


A Circus of Horrors, a Life of Ashes

by Tenukii



Series: We're Going to Talk about Judy [2]
Category: The Secret History of Twin Peaks - Mark Frost, Twin Peaks
Genre: Alternative Perspective, F/M, Inspired by Music, Revised Version, Slow Burn, Speculation, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me-Related
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-29
Updated: 2018-10-16
Packaged: 2019-01-06 22:27:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 23,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12220224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tenukii/pseuds/Tenukii
Summary: From Buenos Aires in 1987 to Philadelphia in 1989 and back again, by way of Seattle and a room above a convenience store.  FBI agent Phillip Jeffries’s perspective of what he believes to be a linear series of events involving a certain Miss Judy.





	1. Chapter 1

“It happened in Buenos Aires. . . .  Jeffries identified a shadowy suspect, someone he believed could be the central person of interest in charge of this entire operation.  All he had, at first, was a name. . . .  Judy.”

\--FBI Agent Tamara Preston

\--

Chimney sweep sparrow with guise  
Judy in disguise, with glasses  
Come to me tonight, come to me tonight  
Taking everything in sight  
  
Judy in disguise, what you aiming for?  
A circus of horrors, well that’s what you are  
You made me a life of ashes

\--John Fred & His Playboy Band, “Judy in Disguise (with Glasses)”

\--

**Buenos Aires, Argentina  
1987 (I)**

Phillip Jeffries usually had a song stuck in his head.

He told Gordon Cole it was good for his memory, that he set up codes for himself—half true, half an excuse for why Phillip would sometimes sing under his breath or tap his thin fingers to a beat only he could hear.  Sometimes he caught himself dancing.

Now, as he glided into the lobby of the Palm Deluxe hotel, Phillip kept the music out of his head.  Easy enough to do, because there was real music in the air, a harp and guitars.  Everything about the lobby—the music, the décor, the plants in their urns and the shrimp-gorged-flamingo peachy pink paint on the walls—had a tropical-Rococo feel to it.  Albert would have found it gauche and over-the-top; Gordon, quaint and amusing.  Phillip noticed the décor only long enough to wonder if any nearby shops sold a shirt the same color as the walls.  He was already wearing boots that color, and he’d like to have a shirt to match them.  Then his mind was back on the business at hand.

“Mr. Jeffries!” the clerk at the front desk hailed Phillip as he walked in, left hand shoved in his pocket, right carrying his suitcase.  The clerk was talking a mile a minute before Phillip had even made it over to the desk, and he shoved the room key into Phillip’s hand as soon as Phillip did get there and stood staring at the clerk over the tops of his sunglasses.

“Here is your key, Mr. Jeffries,” the clerk cooed.  “We hope you enjoy your stay here at the Palm Deluxe.”  All the while, Phillip was processing and considering: _Overly enthusiastic or got something to hide?_

“Oh.  Uh, _gracias_.”  Phillip exhaled, took his time removing his sunglasses and smiling.  Most of the time, he did everything slowly—spoke slowly, moved slowly—and in an exaggerated way, just as he exaggerated his southern accent.  Playing up his southern-ness disarmed people, and it gave him time to think.  In the United States, at least, few people expected someone who talked the way Phillip did to be clever (or, sometimes, literate), and they didn’t expect him to be any faster on his feet or with a gun than he was with his voice.

Now, as Phillip spoke slowly and moved slowly, the clerk kept a warm smile on his face and showed no signs of impatience.  Maybe he really was just overly enthusiastic.  Phillip proceeded to ask his next question while looking down at the clerk’s desk blotter.  He spoke as if he was asking for a rare amenity he already knew the hotel could not secure for him.

“Do you have a Miss Judy staying here, by any chance?”

When Phillip said her name, his eyes flicked up to meet the clerk’s expectant, eager-to-please gaze.  There was no change in the other man’s expression upon hearing the name, yet he didn’t answer the question, either.  Instead, he looked around the desktop until he spotted what he was seeking behind an ornate golden clock.  The clerk beamed and snatched up a white envelope.

“This is for you!  _La senorita—_ ” he began as he held the envelope out to Phillip.  When Phillip kept both hands on his sunglasses and did not reach to take the envelope, the clerk put both of _his_ hands on the envelope and translated, “The young lady, she left it for you!”

There should not have been a letter; there was to have been the _senorita_ herself, in the flesh, and so maybe the clerk _did_ have something to hide.  But in the few seconds he hesitated, Phillip decided it would do no good for him to make a scene about it.  He took the envelope and tucked it into his suit jacket, and the clerk gave his desk bell a rousing ding to summon the bellhop.

Phillip handed over first his room key, then his suitcase to the bellhop, who was wearing a tropical-print shirt as loud as the one Phillip himself had on under his jacket.  The bellhop led him through the lobby, past the guitars and all the tropical-Rococo, but Phillip’s teeth were clenched behind his closed lips, and his mind was moving far faster than the leisurely pace at which he followed.

\--

As soon he’d tipped the bellhop and gotten him out of the hotel room, Phillip sat down on the bed and whipped the envelope back out of his jacket.  Now his movements were quick and sure, no one watching to fool and frustrate with his slow southern charm.  The envelope was hotel stationery, sealed, his name—“Mister Phillip Jeffries”—written on the front in longhand.  “Mister” written out, not abbreviated.  English, not Spanish.  Longhand, cursive, but it looked like a schoolgirl’s writing and not a woman’s.  Phillip turned the envelope over and levered one fingertip under the corner of the flap, then wiggled his bony finger until the envelope tore open.

The paper folded inside was hotel stationery as well.  Phillip clasped it between thumb and forefinger, pulled it out, and unfolded it.  A few lines of the same schoolgirl cursive sat at the top half of the page:

_Mr. Jeffries,_

_Something has come up, and I cannot meet you until this evening.  The hotel has a bar outside on the beach.  I will be there at six, in a red dress._

_-Judy_

That was all.  Phillip gritted his teeth and reread the odd, stilted sentences several times.  They sounded off.  Halfway through reading the letter a fourth time, Phillip’s brain jumped away, back in time more than ten years ago and seven thousand miles northwest to where a dying woman smiled and told him and Gordon Cole, “I’m like the blue rose.”

Right before Phillip left for Argentina, Gordon had told him this wasn’t just _a_ blue rose case, it was _the_ blue rose case.  Lois Duffy’s tulpa had been _like_ the blue rose.  Judy _was_ the blue rose.

Gordon, in his usual obtuse manner, had not elaborated further, and Phillip knew him well enough not to press him for more.  Chances were equal that there _wasn’t_ any more, or that whatever else Gordon could tell Phillip would only complicate things further.  Phillip knew what he needed to know: Judy was important, the most important. . . suspect? witness? . . . person of interest he had ever sought out.  She was the blue rose, and it was Phillip’s task to find her, to meet with her, to take whatever it was she had to give.

She was _his_ blue rose.

He read the letter one last time, then flicked the paper closed and slid it back in the envelope.  Despite the awkward phrasing and childish handwriting, Phillip couldn’t believe that Judy was a tulpa, a thoughtform duplicate like the dying, smiling, disappearing Lois Duffy had been.

Judy felt original.  Judy felt _real_.

“Slow down,” Phillip muttered to himself, out loud.  “Don’t even know what she looks like yet.  Just a red dress.”  Gordon didn’t know either, unless he was holding out.  All Phillip had to go on was her name, Judy.  Short for Judith, meaning “praised.”

“ _Praised_ ,” Phillip whispered in his slow drawl.  Praised for what?  Praised by _whom_?

Phillip laid the envelope on the nightstand beside the bed, then stood so he could slip off the linen jacket that, like most of his clothing, fit him too loosely to suit his thin frame.  He draped the jacket over the back of a chair, stepped out of his shrimp-pink cowboy boots, untucked his shirt, and stripped off his belt.  Then he lay down on the bed and stretched out flat on his back with his mismatched eyes fixed on the ceiling and his arms resting at his sides.  As he waited for six o’clock, Phillip Jeffries tapped his fingertips against the bedspread to the beat of the music in his head.

\--

To be continued


	2. Chapter 2

**Buenos Aires, Argentina  
1987 (II)**

He saw her, waiting for him outside the open-air bar which faced the ocean, before she saw him: a short, rather plain woman with straight, dark brown hair that fell to her shoulders.  The red dress she wore was a knee-length halter top belted just above her waist, quite modest in comparison to the 80s-loud beach attire of the other women at the bar.

As far as Phillip could judge, Judy was indeed young and possibly of Asian descent, but he couldn’t tell much else about her: even though the sun was setting and the bar faced the eastward ocean, a pair of oversized sunglasses with bright red frames covered her eyes and most of her upper face.  Certain things about her—all the red, the stiff way she stood, the way she kept her face turned toward the ocean and ignored the people around her—made her stand out to Phillip, yet no one else seemed to notice her at all.

Phillip wore his own sunglasses again, and he’d put Judy’s letter back in his jacket.  He shoved both hands into his pants pockets and approached her at his slightly-faster-than-slow amble, the one that was almost dancing.  It tended amuse people and put them at ease.  Even so, Judy didn’t acknowledge him until he was right beside her; only then did she turn her head and look up at him.

“Miss Judy?” Phillip drawled.  He smiled, not too broadly.

“Mr. Jeffries.  You received my message.”  Her voice was flat and toneless, unremarkable with no accent.  She did not seem impressed with Phillip, but women rarely were—amused by his quirks, annoyed by his oddities, but not impressed.  Phillip had slipped his hand from his pocket to hold out to her, but then he noticed how she held back and pressed her hands flat against her thighs.  She did not want to be touched.

“Yes,” he said.  “I do hope our little meetin’ ain’t inconveniencin’ you.”  A little heavy on the southern-ness, but Phillip suddenly had the impression that he would be wise to disarm Miss Judy, if he could.  Turn on the charm, the graciousness, the unsophisticated good ol’ boy act—everything he had, all at once.  Beneath her school girl handwriting and modest attire, Judy was dangerous.

_She’s putting on an act, as much as I am,_ Phillip thought.

Judy said, “It is not.  I have taken care of what came up this afternoon.”  She sounded as if whatever had “come up” had been both irritating and dealt with swiftly.

Phillip smiled all the same and asked, “Well then, shall we get started?”  He gestured toward the bar.  She turned her head to follow the motion of his hand, then looked back to him.  He could see nothing of her eyes behind her sunglasses.

“All right,” she said.

Phillip let Judy go in first, and he followed her.  She walked stiffly, hips all but motionless as far as he could tell in the loose skirt of her dress.  The front and sides of the bar were open, but the wall at the back blocked the waning sunlight, and Phillip slipped his sunglasses off and into his jacket as Judy led the way to an empty table near the wall, where the light was dimmest.  She kept her sunglasses on.

The tables were high, the kind that required those tall chairs which people fell off of so amusingly when they got too drunk.  Judy went to the far side of the table, and Phillip barely made it around in time to pull out her chair for her.  She stared at the chair, then at him; at least, he assumed she was staring at him, because she turned her plain face up to his.  He could see his reflection in the curved black lenses of her gaudy glasses: gelled and spiked hair, long nose, gold cross glinting on the triangle of his chest that was bared by his partially unbuttoned shirt.

“Did you want to sit here?” Judy asked him.

“What?  No.  You go right ahead,” Phillip said.  He offered her the chair with a flourish of his hand, then backed up to pull out his own and perch in it.

Judy looked at her chair again, then back at him.  “Why did you move the chair, then?”

Phillip opened his mouth and closed it back; then he looked at the chair too before he managed to explain, “I was pulling it out for you. To sit in.”  When he glanced back at her, her mouth was closed in a faint, pensive frown, and Phillip thought for the first time what a stupid custom it was to pull out a woman’s chair.  Southern politeness be damned, it was _stupid_.

“Oh,” said Judy, as if she still didn’t understand but wasn’t going to press the issue—not because she didn’t want to look obtuse, not because she didn’t want to make _him_ look obtuse, but because it wasn’t worth her time.  Instead, she turned to face the chair, looked it up and down, then grasped it in both hands and literally climbed up into it using the rungs on its legs.  She was too short just to sit in it from standing on the ground.  Watching her, Phillip smiled.

Before either of them had a chance to speak, a female server in a bikini top and sarong came to take their drink orders.  She addressed both “Mr. Jeffries” and “Miss Judy” by name.

“Can I buy you a drink?” Phillip asked Judy.

She hesitated but then gave a short nod and asked the server for a bloody Mary.  Phillip asked her to make it two.

When the server left their table, Judy began, “Mr. Jeffries—” and he interrupted her with, “Phillip, please.”

“Why?”

Phillip stared at her.

He had thought she was dangerous, he had thought he needed to disarm her—and was this her way of disarming him first, not by being seductive or charming like he might expect of a dangerous woman, but by being. . . whatever she was being?

_Strange,_ part of him said, the Bureau part of him, _because it’s like she doesn’t know any of the stupid games men and women play._

_Wonderful_ , the rest of him said, _for exactly the same reason._

He told her, “Well, considering that I’m on a first name basis with you—by necessity, mind—it’s only fair you call me by _my_ first name.”

Judy pressed her lips together, not pursing them but not quite in a frown this time either.  She was not wearing lipstick, but she might have had some kind of gloss on—or maybe it was just ChapStick.  Phillip didn’t know very much about makeup.  Whatever she wore, or didn’t wear, on them, her lips were thin and not particularly remarkable.  Nevertheless, his eyes were drawn to them, repeatedly.

“All right,” she finally said, “Phillip.”  He liked the way she said his name, slightly questioning, not quite so flat and toneless as the rest of her words.  She went on, “I want to be sure we understand one another, based on what your contact communicated to my contact when they arranged this meeting between us.”

“Yes, that’s a very good idea,” Phillip agreed.  At that moment, the server returned with a tray holding their drinks and a stack of cocktail napkins.  The server smiled broadly, showing very white teeth between full lips coated in bright, coral pink lipstick.  Phillip looked up at her and smiled back as she set out the cocktails and extra napkins, then lit a candle in a hurricane lamp sitting on the table.

“Can I get you anything else, Mr. Jeffries?” the server asked him.

“Oh, nothing at all,” he assured her.  “Miss Judy?”

She had been sitting with her face turned down, stirring her drink with the piece of celery that had come in it, but she lifted her head when he addressed her.

“What?”

“Do you want anything else?” Phillip asked.

“No,” said Judy.  She lifted the dripping celery stick to her mouth and bit it in half.

Phillip smiled up at the server again and told her, “We’re fine for now, thank you, miss.”  She bobbed her head and sashayed off with her tray.

As soon as she was gone, Judy dropped the remaining half of the celery stick back into her bloody Mary and said, “Mister—Phillip, to continue.  The way I understand it, you have a ‘friend’ who is searching for something.  Through a tiresome tangle of channels not worth retracing, your friend has come to believe that I have access to this thing.  And so your friend has sent you in his stead to meet with me to find out two things.”

Judy paused to lift her glass to her lips.  Phillip watched as she drank from it, swallowing several times so that she half-drained it before setting the glass down again.

Then Judy continued, “One, do I indeed have information on how to access what your friend wants.  And two, will I pass that information on to you.”  She fell silent, turned her face toward Phillip’s, and waited.

\--

Judy wasn’t entirely wrong.  Phillip’s friend was Gordon Cole, and what he sought—what the entire Blue Rose team, of which FBI Agent Phillip Jeffries was the head, sought—could be classified as a _something_.  More accurately, however, it was a _nothing_.  Phillip knew little more than that because Gordon wouldn’t tell him much more than that.  Gordon might not even know more himself.

“It’s a negative,” Gordon had told Phillip (or rather, yelled at Phillip) during their first briefing of the investigation which had ultimately led Phillip to Judy.  “A very old and very negative. . . _force._  I don’t know how else to describe it, because it’s not like anything we’ve encountered before.  And by we, I mean mankind, not just you and me.  I’ve had communication from Major Garland Briggs over at the LPA—you remember Briggs, Phillip, you met him back in ’82?—and he suspects that this negative is behind some strange transmissions they’ve received over there on Blue Pine Mountain.”

“Transmissions from who?  And where?” Phillip had interrupted.  He had gone into what he thought of as Cole-mode, in which he mostly listened and absorbed.  Later, Phillip would sort it all out and decide how much was actually significant. . . and how much of that was actually the truth.  Still, Phillip thought knowing who had sent the transmissions might be important.

“Outer space,” Gordon had confided in a shout.  “The transmissions came from _deep_ space, and Briggs believes they originated from this force.”

Phillip had nodded, lulled back into Cole-mode, but then he started alert again.  He usually tried to keep the “ain’ts” out of his speech except when he was deliberately playing up the down-home, good ol’ boy image, but in excitable moments, his native tongue got the better of him.  This was one of those moments, and his often exaggerated accent got even thicker.

He had blurted out, “Now hold on here, Gord, you mean to tell me this ‘negative’ ain’t just a force, it’s an _entity_?  It’s sentient and sendin’ us _messages_?”

“No, no, Phillip, I’m not saying anything like that,” Gordon had assured him.  “What I’ve heard about this negative force may be no more than old folk tales of evil spirits, and the messages Briggs supposedly intercepted may be no more than the babbling of some faulty equipment going haywire.  But I believe there _is_ a connection between the negative and our Blue Rose cases, and quite possibly Briggs’s mystery transmissions as well.”

Phillip had calmed down and tamed his unruly southern-ness and gone back into Cole-mode again.  But he hadn’t quite forgotten his panic, and sometimes he wondered if Gordon hadn’t been saying _exactly_ what Phillip thought he’d been saying, after all.

\--

Now, Phillip faced his own reflection in the lenses of Judy’s glasses and said as amiably as he could manage, “Yes ma’am, Miss Judy, you understand the situation perfectly.”

She licked her lips then looked down into her glass.  The tip of a leaf revealed where the half-eaten celery stick had sunk, and Judy grasped it between thumb and forefinger to fish the vegetable stalk out.  Phillip watched her eat it, leaves and all.

After a moment passed without Judy speaking again, Phillip said, “I suppose you want to arrange some kind of deal, as to what you’ll receive in exchange for this information.”

Judy swallowed, drank from her glass, then swallowed again.  She lifted her face to Phillip’s and remained silent a few more seconds before replying.

“No,” she said.  “The deal has already been made.”

“What?”  Phillip had finally wrapped his hand around his own, untouched drink, but his fingers slipped on the slick glass when she spoke.  He knew then that he was already disarmed, completely.

_Never stood a chance,_ he lamented with silent admiration, _rest in peace the cool of Phillip Jeffries.  Laid low by a stalk of celery._

So Phillip asked, “What deal?  Who with?” without too much shame.  That Judy, or whoever she worked for, had already gone behind his back or over his head didn’t surprise him much.  But if Gordon was the one who had already promised Judy something in return for her information, without letting Phillip know about it, Regional Bureau Chief Cole and Agent Jeffries were gonna have a little chat when Phillip got back from Buenos Aires.

But Judy shook her head slightly and said, “It was already arranged between our contacts, before you or I got directly involved.  So you only need to ask two questions to get the information you came for.”

Phillip wasn’t satisfied about the “deal,” but he doubted he learn any moret.  If he pressed her for details about what _she_ was getting out of this whole thing, Judy might decide she didn’t feel like talking to him at all.

“All right, Miss Judy,” Phillip drawled.  “I’ll ask you my two little questions.  _Do_ you have information on how to access this thing my friend wants?”

With no hesitation, she said, “Yes.”

Phillip finally took a sip from his glass.  The ice had begun to melt and water down the cocktail, but he could still taste the salt in the tomato juice in his mouth, and on his lips when he licked them after setting the glass down.

“All right,” he repeated.  “And will you pass this information on to me?”

“Yes,” said Judy.

He’d asked his two questions, but more came out of his mouth before he could stop them: “Why?  Because of the deal you made?  Or rather, the deal that was made on your behalf?”

Phillip wasn’t sure she would answer that, but Judy shrugged and replied, “That was part of it.  But I wasn’t certain that I could give you this information, until I met you.  I had to be sure.”

“Sure of what?” murmured Phillip.

Judy paused in thought, then said slowly, “Sure of _you_.”

Phillip watched her face, now turned slightly down toward the tabletop, and wondered where her eyes were looking.  At her glass?  At the flickering flame of the candle in the hurricane lamp?  At him?  The sky was almost fully dark by now, yet Judy kept the dark glasses on.  Phillip, almost always with a song stuck in his head, was abruptly reminded of a ridiculous pop hit of a few years before.  The first few words beat in his brain: _I wear my sunglasses at night, so I can so I can—_

_So I can what?_ Phillip wondered.  He couldn’t remember the rest of it.  Probably a blessing.

“You’re sure,” he echoed out loud, “about me.”

Judy turned her face back to him and said again, “Yes.  I will tell you some things here, now.  I will tell you what your friend is seeking.  That is because I cannot tell you how to access it, here and now—that will have to wait.”

Ah, there it was.  The gimmick, the catch.

Phillip repeated, “It’ll have to wait.  Of course it will.”  The words came out more bitter than he intended.  Judy pressed her lips together again, frowning outright this time.

“I said I will tell you about this thing, as a sign of good faith.  And that’s more than your friend has done, isn’t it, Phillip?”

Every alarm in every part of him went off at once, because how did Judy know _anything_ about what Gordon Cole had or hadn’t told Phillip Jeffries?  Phillip had to know, and he had to be careful.

He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms and said, “All right, Miss Judy, then tell me.  Tell me what my friend is lookin’ for.”

\--

To be continued


	3. Chapter 3

**Buenos Aires, Argentina  
1987 (III)**

Judy reached over and picked up one of the cocktail napkins the server had left; then she asked Phillip, “Do you have a pen?”  He felt around in his jacket, found one, and handed it to her.  Judy pushed the cap off with her thumb and began to draw something on the napkin using slow, careful lines.  The thin plies of paper that made up the napkin rippled under the pressure of the ballpoint, and Judy scowled as she had to smooth out the napkin to continue.

As Phillip watched her, the inane song about sunglasses at night dropped from his mind, and he thought of another song instead.  It was one from the sixties, a parody of the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”  It made about as much sense as the original, but what got Phillip to thinking of it was that it was about a girl named Judy.

Phillip sang the first couple lines in his head, trying to remember the words, and he came up with, _Judy in disguise, well that’s what you are. . . lemonade pies with a brand new car._   Good God A’mighty, if Miss Judy didn’t understand Phillip now, he’d better not try to explain the song she reminded him of.

He lowered his eyes from her face to what she had drawn on the napkin.  It was a diamond shape, not an elongated diamond like on a playing card but a square diamond, like on a baseball field.  It had two V-shapes coming out of its lower sides, their points facing Phillip, and Judy was just finishing the second one.  She set the pen aside, then spun the napkin around so that from Phillip’s perspective, the Vs became chevrons connected to the upper sides of the diamond.

Phillip glanced up at Judy’s face and found it turned towards his, so that he met his own eyes reflected in her glasses.

“This is what your friend is seeking,” she said.

Phillip looked back at the thing she had drawn.

“That,” he muttered.  “That little bitty thing.”

Judy said flatly, “This is a representation.  A symbol,” as if Phillip might not realize that.  He couldn’t manage to be offended.  In fact, it made him smile.

“Right,” he said.  “A sigil. . . a glyph.”  It reminded him a bit of the Nazca lines in Peru, but far less complex. . . and far more direct.  Instead of seeing a whole creature in its outline, Phillip felt he was looking right into a face.  _Like the face of an insect,_ he decided.  _The diamond is its head, and the carats are its antennae.  It’s watching me, not with eyes but with those antennae, crooked and alert._

Judy splayed her hand flat over the little napkin to cover the drawing, then drew her fingers up into a fist and crumpled the napkin into a ball.  Phillip blinked at her as she dropped the ball into the hurricane lantern.  The candle flame flared and smoked as the paper caught fire and began to turn to ash.

She plucked another napkin from the stack, slapped it down in front of Phillip, and pushed the pen over to him.

“You draw it,” Judy said.  “I want to be sure you’ll remember it.”

Phillip lifted his glass to take another drink and dried his hand on his pants leg after he set the glass down again.  He licked his lips, picked up the pen, and drew the same symbol she had shown him.

“I won’t forget it,” he muttered.  “It sticks in the mind.”

“Does it?” Judy asked.  Phillip looked up from what he had drawn.

“Yes,” he said.

Judy said, “Good.  You can put your pen away.”  She scooped up her glass and drained the rest of her bloody Mary, leaving only a few thin and round-edged ice cubes behind.  Phillip tucked his pen back inside his jacket, then started to do the same with the cocktail napkin.  Judy’s small hand shot out and closed over his wrist, crumpling the sleeve of his jacket around it.

She hissed, “No.  You don’t take it, and you don’t show it to anyone.  You don’t draw it for anyone else—understand?”  Her grip over Phillip’s bony arm was almost tight enough to bruise, even cushioned by his sleeve.

“All right, I understand,” he murmured.  He didn’t try to move her hand, but he released his hold on the napkin.  After a few seconds, Judy let him go and took the napkin instead.  She bent her head to look down at it, and finally Phillip decided to risk questioning her.

He drawled, “What I _don’t_ understand is what it means.  I know what it looks like, to me anyway, and I know a little about what it is my friend’s looking for.  But I don’t understand how _this_ —”  He pointed at the drawing.  “—could represent _that_.”

Judy said nothing at first and only kept looking down at the napkin.  Then she muttered, “You will understand more next week.”

“Next week?” Phillip prompted.  He ducked his own head to try to catch her gaze, or at least where he thought her gaze was.

“Next week, I want you to meet me in Seattle.  There, I will give you the rest of the information you want.”

“Oh,” breathed Phillip.  “Why Seattle?”  Not that he had a problem with it.  To the contrary, Seattle wasn’t far to go to see Judy, when Phillip had assumed they’d never meet again after Buenos Aires.

“I have a place there,” Judy replied.

“Oh.  You want me to come to _your_ place,” Phillip confirmed, allowing himself a slight smile.  At that, Judy did lift her face enough to meet his eyes, as far as he could guess from the angle of her sunglasses.  Her lips opened slightly.

After a pause, she said, “It’s necessary.  I apologize if it will be inconvenient.”

Phillip exhaled in a chuckle and said, “No ma’am, it won’t be inconvenient.  Where in Seattle am I supposed to meet you, and when?”

“Fly into Sea-Tac next Thursday.  I will meet you at the airport and take you to my apartment,” Judy said.

Phillip lifted one of his already-arched eyebrows further.  “You’ll meet me ‘next Thursday’?  Is there a way for me to contact you to let you know which flight I’ll be on, or are you gonna wait at the airport all day until I show up?”

“You won’t need to contact me.  I’ll be informed of your flight,” Judy announced.  Phillip pressed his lips together, not smiling now.

“Informed?  By whom?”

“We both have our contacts, Phillip,” replied Judy.

He retorted, “Yeah, well.  _My_ man on the street don’t track all the flights comin’ in to an international airport.”  Too late Phillip heard himself slipping back into his Virginia accent out of frustration.

Irritation edged into Judy’s flat voice too as she responded, “Neither do _my_ contacts.  They don’t have to—they only need to track _you_.”

Phillip wondered if Gordon knew about it—that whoever Judy’s people were, they had tabs on the Bureau, good enough tabs to know which flight an agent was taking, in time for Judy to be there to meet it when it landed.  Hell, Gordon probably _did_ know.  Damned if he probably hadn’t okayed the whole God-blasted operation, and that was why the desk clerk at the Palm Deluxe had been all “Mr. Jeffries!” at him the second Phillip walked in, and why even the cocktail waitress knew his name.

He glared into the blank lenses of Judy’s sunglasses.  He was angry at her, but he was angrier at Gordon for being careless with him, and angriest at himself for being equally careless.  Then Phillip’s stupid memory decided it was the right time to recall the rest of the song lyrics he’d been struggling with:

_Chimney sweep sparrow with guise,_   
_Judy in disguise, with glasses._   
_Come to me tonight, come to me tonight,_   
_Taking everything in sight—_

Judy cut into the song playing in his head: “Do you want to back out?  Tell your friend I didn’t show up, and don’t come to Seattle next week.  Forget you saw this.”  She rested her fingertips on the napkin.  “We’ll leave you alone.  You have my word.”

“Your _word_ ,” Phillip scoffed.  He’d been clenching his teeth without knowing it, and when he made himself unclench them, he just ended up worrying the corner of his mouth between them instead.  When he was a kid, Phillip had busted his lower lip there on the left side, and he had a habit of biting at the scar when he got agitated.

When Judy frowned, like maybe he’d offended her honor by implying he didn’t trust her, he went on, “You said you’re sure of me, but I maybe ain’t so sure of _you_ yet, Miss Judy, and maybe I ain’t so sure of your ‘contacts’ who’re keepin’ such a close eye on little ol’ Phillip.  I ain’t used to ladies givin’ me such de _voted_ attention.”

Politeness and charm be damned; talking all midwestern and proper be _double_ damned.  Phillip was still frustrated, and he was still angry, and on top of all that, he was both humiliated and hurt that she thought so little of him, she assumed he’d not only back out but also lie about it.

Judy tilted her head to the side a fraction of an inch.

“I ain’t backin’ out.  Fuck that,” he growled.  He bit down on his lip and a second later tasted the iron tang of his own blood.

“Don’t do that,” said Judy.

Phillip asked in a snap of suspicion, “Don’t do what?”  He thought she had a problem with his swearing until she leaned across the table and touched the napkin he’d drawn on to the corner of his mouth.

“Don’t make yourself bleed.  You’ll attract attention,” Judy muttered.  The rough texture of the napkin stung as she pressed it against his lip.  “Hurting yourself won’t accomplish anything.”

When she pulled the napkin away, Phillip’s tongue automatically probed the sore spot on his lip.  Judy hissed with an “ugh” sound and jammed the napkin down on his lip again, practically into his mouth.  This time when she drew her hand back, she left the napkin stuck there.  Judy folded her hands on the table next to her nearly empty glass and looked at him, and when Phillip thought of how he must appear with a cocktail napkin sticking out of his mouth, he had to laugh at himself.  Being thought a coward was humiliating, but looking silly had never bothered him.

“And thith ithn’t thuppothed to attract attenthion?” he asked Judy with a muffled chuckle as he gestured to the napkin.

She said, all seriousness, “It depends on whose attention you want to avoid.  If you don’t want my contacts watching you too closely, don’t go around bleeding.”  But then she turned her head and finally appeared to notice the bemused glances Phillip was garnering from some of the other patrons in the bar.  Judy looked back at him, shrugged her bare shoulders. . . and smiled.

It was a very small smile, just the edges of her plain mouth turning up, but it was the first time she had smiled at him all evening.  As awkward and rusty as she was at it, it might as well have been the first time she had smiled _ever_.

Phillip tugged the crumpled napkin free of his sore lip, holding back a wince at the twinge of pain, and dropped it on the table.  Two small, dark red blots of his blood overlapped part of his pen drawing, the glyph of Gordon Cole’s Nothing the Great and Terrible.  Judy smoothed out the napkin with her fingertips and looked down at it.  The smile had evaporated from her lips.

“You are coming then, next week?” she asked, without raising her head.

“Yes.  Thursday,” said Phillip.  He hesitated, waffling over whether he should apologize, before blurting out, “I’m sorry I lost my temper, I—”

“No,” she interrupted him.  Phillip exhaled a sharp sigh of renewed frustration—did the confounded woman _want_ him to stay mad at her?—but he relaxed when she continued, “You have the right to be angry.”  She traced the symbol he’d drawn on the napkin with one finger, starting and ending with his bloodstains, then crumpled the napkin and burned it as she had the other.  When it had become ashes, she turned back to face him.

“We’re finished here,” Judy announced.  “You have all the answers you’ll get tonight.”

“That’s hardly satisfyin’, Miss Judy,” drawled Phillip.  He did not want to say good night, as infuriating as she could be.  He wondered if she had other plans for the evening.

“You’ll know more in a week,” she replied, “when you come to Seattle.”

“I’m not talkin’ about what my friend wants,” Phillip said.  He hesitated again then thought to hell with it.  He was already drawling, he’d lost his temper, and he’d bit his lip until it bled.  He was laid bare and vulnerable, and she was oblivious to hints and subtlety.  He might as well be blunt.

Phillip told Judy, “I wanna know more about _you_.  Now, not next week.”

She was still for a moment; ten she shook her head slightly and said, “No, you don’t want to know about me.”

 _I think I do, Miss Judy.  I think I want to know every last little thing about you,_ Phillip thought, but he supposed that if sheer bluntness hadn’t worked, nothing would.

“All right,” he said aloud.  “Until next Thursday, then.”  He pulled his wallet out of his pants pocket for the cash to cover their drinks, and stuck the folded bills under the edge of the hurricane lamp.  Only a few curled ashes remained of the burned napkins.  They drifted back and forth in the air currents produced by the candle’s flame.  Phillip sighed, stood, and tucked his wallet away.

As Judy got up too, he asked her, “Are you headin’ out somewhere, or can I walk you to your room?”  She stopped and tilted her head up toward him again.  He was beginning to see it as a quizzical gesture, despite Judy’s lack of expression when she did it.

She said, “I’m going to my room, but why would you walk with me?”  Phillip chuckled gently, because of course she wouldn’t understand.

“Where I come from, it’s considered a polite gesture,” he said, playing up his accent now, “for a man to walk a lady to her door.  I believe the implication is that he accompanies her for her protection.”

“For her protection,” Judy repeated with the faintest air of disbelief.

Phillip smiled and added, “I ain’t implyin’ that you need my protection, just that I’d enjoy a few more minutes of your company.”

He half expected to get another “Why?”, but instead, she said with what sounded like suppressed humor, “No.  I don’t need protection.  But if you want to walk with me. . . then walk with me.”

Phillip crooked his left arm at the elbow and held it out to her.  She glanced down at it, then apparently figured out what to do with it and put her right arm through it.  Judy rested her over Phillip’s wrist without gripping it, this time.  No one looked at them as they left the bar.  Even the people who had stared at Phillip’s wounded mouth ignored him now.

The Palm Deluxe lobby was still bustling at that early hour of the evening, only a little past seven.  Phillip took Judy to the elevator, asked her floor, then pressed the button marked “6” when she answered.  On the way up, she stood close to his side although she was quiet.

On the sixth floor, they walked down the hall until Judy stopped in front of a door and said, “This is my room.”  When she started to slip her arm from his, Phillip let her go.  Judy stood with her back to the door and took the room key from a pocket in her dress.

“Remember what I said, Phillip,” she told him, “and be careful.  Do not show anyone what I showed you.  And don’t bite yourself again.”  Her mouth twitched into a second smile, and Phillip felt amazed to realize she meant to be humorous.

“Yes, ma’am,” he agreed with a little flourish of a bow.  He took her hand, kissed its knuckles, and murmured against them, “Good night, Miss Judy.”

When his lips touched her hand, it began to shake.

Phillip straightened up and released her hand.  He might have asked if she felt all right, but Judy turned away from him and shoved her room key into the door’s lock.  In the seconds between getting the door unlocked and disappearing into the room behind it, Judy muttered, “Good night, Phillip.”

He stood alone outside her door a moment, shaking his head slowly and tonguing the sore spot on his lip.  Then he went back to the elevator and returned to his own room, half-dancing down the hall to the music circling in his head.

\--

To be continued


	4. Chapter 4

**Seattle, Washington  
1987**

Phillip wore his white suit and tropical shirt to Seattle because the weather was forecast to be dreary, and he thought a little bit of Buenos Aires would make the trip cheerier.  He had not been in contact with anyone over the past week—no one at the Bureau, and no one connected to Judy.  Neither had he drawn the symbol again, the diamond shape with its two carats.  Phillip had promised Judy he wouldn’t.

He still had the letter she’d left for him at the hotel desk, though, and he’d taken that out and studied it again and again.  On the bottom of the letter, during the nearly eight hour flight from Chesapeake to Seattle, Phillip absently drew a figure eight, then tilted it on its side and drew a lemniscate, the symbol for infinity.  He didn’t know why until he thought about Gordon Cole and his briefing.

_It’s a negative.  A very old and very negative force._

Phillip thought, _This thing you got me huntin’s an infinity, ain’t it, Gord old buddy?  It’s been around forever, and it’ll be around forever unless we rein it in. . . it’ll be around forever sproutin’ more blue roses._   He thought of the insect thing and imagined it scuttling through a garden of nothingness, tending a mess of tangled thorns where sometimes impossible roses of blue blossomed.  Roses with names like Lois Duffy.

_Judy_ , he abruptly thought.  _The tulpa said she was like the blue rose—what if Judy is too?  What if she disappears, too?_   Panic began to simmer in his chest, and in his mind’s eye, the insect thing lifted a faceless, diamond-shaped head with crooked antennae.  It stared at Phillip even without eyes, and he stared back.

Phillip carried no luggage except for a change of clothes in a carry-on, so he skipped the baggage claim after he deplaned.  He wondered if Judy or her contacts could have predicted that.  Maybe so, because she was already there waiting for him.  Unlike Phillip, she had dressed differently than at their last meeting: jeans and a plain white blouse, although she still wore the red-rimmed sunglasses.

“Phillip,” she said when he had drawn close enough to speak.

“Miss Judy.”  Phillip smiled.  He was genuinely happy to see her.

“You can drop the honorific,” Judy said.  “I’m not a little girl.”  She turned and started walking toward the exit, apparently expecting Phillip to follow her.  He did so, chuckling.

“You _are_ young, though, ain’t you?” he asked as he strode quickly to catch up.  She laughed too at that, but there wasn’t anything pleasant about the laughter.

“Not really,” Judy said.

Then something else occurred to Phillip: “I’ve just been assumin’ you ain’t married.  Should it be ‘ _Mrs._ Judy’?”

She huffed, “No.  Stop asking pointless questions.  Time is short.”

In the airport’s parking garage, Judy stopped and waited instead of going to a car.  Phillip stood beside her until a small white camper pulled up to the curb.  Judy opened the passenger door but stepped aside and gestured for Phillip to get in first.  Phillip eyed the interior of the camper with distrust.

The driver was a small, neat man with a salt-and-pepper beard.  He looked out at Phillip, saw his hesitation, and reached with his right hand to sweep up a few wrinkled papers from the middle of the vehicle’s bench seat.  The driver shoved the papers under the camper’s visor, as if Phillip were concerned with tidiness and not safety.

“Time is short,” Judy said again.  “Get in.”  No longer so happy to see her, Phillip resisted turning to glare at her.  Instead, he sucked the scarred place on his lip in between his teeth and pushed his own right hand under his linen suit jacket, where he could easily access his gun.  Then he picked up his carry-on bag with his left hand and climbed into the vehicle.  Judy got in after him, and the bearded man started driving them toward the garage’s exit.

“You are Jeffries?” he asked with the slightest emphasis on “you.”

Phillips shifted to face the man head on and said, “Yeah, that’s me.”

Only then did Phillip notice that the left sleeve of his dark grey suit jacket seemed oddly flat and empty, and he realized that the man had only one arm.  Phillip felt an uncomfortable jolt, the way he imagined others must feel when they looked into his eyes and noticed his heterochromia before glancing away, embarrassed.  Normally, Phillip didn’t react rudely like that, and he wondered why he found something like a missing arm so disturbing now.

He made himself look at the man’s face instead and prompted, “And your name?”

The one-armed man glanced at him and said, “I am MIKE,” before returning his gaze to the windshield.

_Nobody’s got a last name in this business,_ Phillip thought as he faced forward again and leaned back against the seat.  MIKE stopped to pay the parking fee at the exit then pulled out onto the street.  It was late afternoon, and the weather was grey though not outright rainy.  Phillip glanced down at his pink boots on the camper’s floorboard, one braced on each side of his carry-on bag.  Instead of cheerful, they looked out of place.

As MIKE navigated the heavy traffic near the airport, he glanced over at Judy and said, “The Arm wants him at the meeting.  So does BOB.”  Phillip supposed that “him” might refer to himself, but BOB could be anyone in their little first-names-only club, and the “The Arm” sounded like a thug in some bad gangster movie.

“No,” muttered Judy.

Phillip turned to her and asked, “What meeting?”

“Nothing that concerns _you_.”

MIKE repeated, “They want him there.  They know about you, Mr. Jeffries, they have been watching you.”

_We both have our contacts,_ Judy had said in Buenos Aires.  Hers, apparently, were too attentive for her liking, for she retorted, “What they know no longer matters, and what they want never did.  Now drop it.”

MIKE said nothing more for the rest of the drive.  He took them to a multi-story apartment building on a side street that, while not exactly what Phillip would call “a bad part of town,” was not exactly idyllic either.  The one-armed man pulled the camper into a parallel parking space in front of the building and killed the engine.

When Judy put her hand on the door handle, Phillip turned away from her and asked MIKE, “What’s this meeting you’re talkin’ about?  And why do those men want me there?”

MIKE looked back at him and said, “They want what she’ll wring out of you.  They want to feed on you.”

“MIKE!” growled Judy, but he ignored her.  His affable face had twisted into a pained and bitter expression—not as if he were incensed by Phillip, maybe not even by Judy herself, but by something which he could not overpower, nevertheless.

The one-armed man hissed, “They want to devour you.  The difference is that they will do it because they hunger, because it gives them pleasure.”  Then his voice fell to an urgent whisper: “But _she_ will devour you and feel nothing because she is empty without hungering or wanting.  Go to meet them or stay away, it will not matter—they know you now.”

Phillip stared at him, unable to formulate a response, until MIKE turned away and put his single hand back on the steering wheel, his expression mild once more.  On Phillip’s other side, Judy flung open the passenger door and got out. 

Phillip slid himself across the bench seat and tugged his bag out of the camper after him.  MIKE did not look back at them, not even when Judy slammed the door closed.  The one-armed man cranked the old vehicle’s engine and drove off as Judy spun away from Phillip and strode up the sidewalk to the apartment building.  Phillip felt like MIKE’s strange ramblings were a warning against the machinations of BOB and the Arm. . . and “she.”  He watched Judy walking away from him and wondered if MIKE had been referring to her.

_What choice do I have **now** , though?_ Phillip asked himself with a shrug of his bony shoulders under his too-large linen jacket.  _I don’t think I would be any safer with MIKE than with them, or with her—and maybe they’re **all** insane.  Maybe I am, too—not like I ain’t been accused of it before._   He grinned to himself, quick and bright, as he followed Judy into the building.

They took a groaning elevator up to Judy’s apartment, and she let Phillip in, all without either of them speaking.  When Judy finally broke the silence to command Phillip to sit down, her voice sounded tight with anger.

“I will give you what you came here for,” she muttered.

The apartment was a small and sparsely furnished studio, impeccably clean—especially in light of the neighborhood—with the look of being unlived in.  Phillip sat on one end of a futon while Judy went over to a tall dresser, the only other large piece of furniture in the room.  She took something from the top drawer before returning to Phillip.  Judy looked down at where he sat for a moment, then sat as well on the other end of the futon.  She kept the thing from the drawer closed up in her hand.

“You came here for this,” Judy said.  Her face was turned toward his; presumably she looked at his eyes from behind her sunglasses.  She extended her hand and opened it, palm up.  “Here.”

A ring lay upon her palm.  It resembled a gold signet ring, except it bore an oval stone shaped from some green material, something like jade.  Phillip drew in a slow breath and bit down on the inside of his lip as he studied the ring and recognized the symbol carved into the green stone: it was the sigil Judy had drawn on the cocktail napkin down in Buenos Aires.

“What is it?” Phillip breathed.

Judy told him, “Take it.  Wear it if you want, but only on your right hand.  When you return to your friend, give the ring to him and tell him to place it on the fourth finger of his left hand, where he would wear a wedding ring.”

Phillip’s arched brows drew together and lowered, but he took the ring from her hand, holding it between his finger and thumb.  He looked at the etched design, the diamond face and the carat antenna of the insect creature that haunted his imagination.

“I don’t understand,” he muttered.  “How will this lead him to anything?  It’s just a _ring_.”

Judy arched her own dark eyebrow, high enough that he could see it above her sunglasses, and asked, “Must _you_ understand?  Remember, you aren’t the one who wants to find this.”  She rested a fingertip on the symbol etched upon the stone.

Phillip shot back, “I _want_ to understand.”  He clasped his free hand over hers before she could draw it back, and he held on even when Judy’s hand began to shake and she tried to pull away.

“Let go,” she hissed.  Her voice wasn’t tight now; it was low and raspy.

“No, not until you talk to me, Judy.  I want to understand, I want to _know_.  I want to know about _this_.”  Phillip held up the ring, sigil facing her, then fumbled with it until he managed to slip it onto the second finger of his right hand.  It fit perfectly, as if it had been crafted just for him.

Then Phillip reached out and grabbed Judy’s other hand too.  She drew in her breath; he heard it snaking through her teeth and saw her narrow chest rise and fall rapidly with it.

Phillip went on, “And I want to know about _it_.  It’s alive, ain’t it?  I’ll put all my cards on the table—everythin’ my _friend_ told me.  All he said was that it’s ancient and it’s a negative force.  We’ve both been studyin’ it and pursuin’ it for years now as the Blue Rose Task Force—Blue Rose because it’s unnatural, see?  Blue roses don’t occur in nature.  They ain’t supposed to exist.”

“Ain’t supposed to exist,” Judy repeated with an exhalation that wasn’t quite a laugh.  “Hah. . . .”

“That’s right.  And it might be sentient, might be sendin’ messages.  ‘Cos that’s its head, ain’t it?”  Phillip nodded down towards the ring.  “It has a head and feelers, like a bug, and it’s _alive_.”

She was staring at him; he was sure of it, even with the sunglasses.  Her lips parted slightly, and then the upper one lifted in something of a sneer.

“Yeah,” she finally answered, her voice matching the drawling cadence of his accent, “yeah, it’s _alive_.  And it’s going to eat you up, Phillip Jeffries, if you aren’t careful.  I’m positive about that—it won’t be able to help itself.  So now that you _understand_ , you need to get your skinny ass back to that airport and on a plane out of here before—”

Phillip cut her off, “ _No_ , ‘cos I got a lot more questions.  The meeting—the meeting, and BOB, and the Arm.  This _thing_ , this entity is what their meeting’s about, ain’t it?  And they want me there ‘cos I’m on to it.  Judy, I came out here to get all the information I can on the thing, so why shouldn’t I go and hear what they have to say?”

Judy snapped at him, “MIKE told you that!  Their kind feeds on pain and suffering.  They want you close so they can feed on _you_.”

Disturbing as that thought was, Phillip had another question that troubled him even more: “MIKE said ‘she’ is gonna feed on me too.  Who was he talking about?  Who is ‘ _she’_?”  When Judy didn’t answer and only continued to regard him from behind the shield of her glasses, Phillip ventured, “Did he mean the negative force?  Is _it_ a ‘she’?  Or. . . or did he mean _you_?  Are you one of ‘their kind’?”

Judy shook her head, slowly, before she replied, “No.  I am not of their kind.”

Phillip still held her hands in his, and he drew them closer to him.  She had given up trying to free them, yet she didn’t accept his touch either, and her arms hung limply from his grasp.

“Then who are you, Judy?” Phillip pleaded.  “And how do you know these things?  Hell, why the glasses?  I’d be satisfied just knowing _that_.  If you got weird looking eyes, it’s no big deal.  I’m used to that.”  Phillip managed a little smile, hoping to put her more at ease—and to his amazement, the tenseness around Judy’s mouth softened slightly.

She answered none of his questions but instead asked, “Why _are_ your eyes like this?”  She finally pulled one of her hands loose from his and reached it up toward his face.  Phillip bit down on the inside of his lip when Judy touched two fingers to his left temple, beside his brown eye.

“Genetic mutation,” mumbled Phillip.  “It’s pretty rare.”

“Is that what makes you different?”

“Different?” Phillip echoed.  “You mean besides my eyes?”

“Yes.  Besides your eyes and the strange way you look and talk.”  Judy frowned in thought, and before Phillip could decide whether or not he should be offended, she added, “You are different from other men.  How you act.  How you _are_.  Is that because you’re a mutant?”

Phillip didn’t think she was trying to offend him after all, but he still rolled his “different” eyes at the word _mutant_.

“The mutation affected my eyes, that’s _all_ , Judy.  Anything else you find strange about the way I look, it’s just _me_.  And I don’t know what you mean about being different from other men.”  Phillip looked down at himself and added, “Unless it’s the clothes.”

Judy was frowning again, and she shook her head.  “No.  I mean. . . that you are not what I expected.”  Then she lifted her hand once more and laid it against the side of his face.  She said, “I like it, and I like your eyes.  But you should go, and I never want to see you again.”

Phillip struggled with how much that hurt, while at the same time, her hand felt warm and welcome against his cheek.  He mumbled, “I’ll go, after the meeting.  But please, let me see your eyes, Judy.  Let me see you.”

Something about Judy’s demeanor altered.  Apparently, he had pushed her too far, and she went right back to being irate.  Yet she did not draw back from him.  In fact, Judy moved closer.  She put her other hand to Phillip’s face to hold his head between her hands, and she half rose from her seat to loom over him as she murmured: “ _The magician longs to see_.”

Then Judy let him go and stood up.  She backed several steps away from the futon as if trying to get distance between them quickly, and Phillip wondered what she was trying to escape, as much as he wondered about the meaning of that strange, poetic sentence she’d uttered.

“The meeting—it’s nearly time.  I must go,” Judy muttered.  “You should not follow.  I have a telephone—you can call a taxi to take you back to the airport.  Give the ring to your friend, and let _him_ be the one to see through the darkness.  Let _him_ walk with the fire.”

Phillip imagined the insect of the eternal negative coming for Gordon Cole through the darkness.  Then he imagined it coming for Judy, his blue rose, his sparrow with guise who took everything and gave him absolutely nothing in return except for a ring bearing the faceless visage of a monster.  Looking up at her, the blank stare of her glasses, he thought that maybe she had given him everything she could.

“No, I’m going with you,” he said.  Leaving his carry-on bag on the floor next to the futon, Phillip got up and went to stand beside the apartment door with his arms folded, where he glared back at her.  “You said you were sure about me, Judy.  You said you were _sure_.”

Judy’s hands clenched into fists at her sides, and she said, “You’re a fool, Phillip, I’m sure about _that_.”  But when she went past him out the door and he followed, she did not try to stop him.

\--

To be continued


	5. Chapter 5

**The Convenience Store  
????**

“You stole the corn!  I had it canned over the store!  And miss, the look on her face when it was opened!  There was a stillness.  Like the Formica tabletop!”  
\--MIKE, _Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me_

\--

The convenience store was run down and falling in, dingy and unbranded.  The only signage was black and bore in white letters the improbable label “CONVENIENCE STORE.”  Judy stalked past the gas pumps—both of them appearing to hail from the 1930s and to be out of order—and went toward the right side of the building as they faced it, where a rusty metal staircase led upwards.  The whole place felt like it came from another time, as if someone had picked it up from forty or fifty years in the past and set it back down again there on a Seattle street corner a few blocks from Judy’s apartment building.

Phillip followed Judy.  She started up the stairs noiselessly, but they creaked with a rusty groan under Phillip’s weight when he came after her.  He hesitated, and she turned to look back down at him.

“Are you certain about this?” she asked.  A single light up on the building’s roof illuminated the rickety staircase.  Although it was still late afternoon and the sun had not yet set behind Seattle’s blanket of clouds, the staircase and in fact the entire lot seemed very dark.  _How can she see anything with those sunglasses on?_ Phillip wondered.

But he answered her, “I’m certain.”  Judy scowled before resuming the upward climb.  Phillip climbed after her, keeping his eyes on the unstable steps.  Only when they neared the top did he look up to see just where it was they were going, and then he stared because the steps went to nowhere—a railed landing set against the doorless brick side of the building, too low to access the roof but too high to access anything else.

Phillip had paused when he looked up, but Judy kept going.  As he watched, she began to flicker, her entire body seeming to flutter in and out of existence.  Fear gripped Phillip around the chest, and he thought about Lois Duffy’s _tulpa_ dying and vanishing.  He pounded up the metal steps after Judy with his pink boots making a horrendous racket.

For an instant, Phillip felt disoriented.  He could smell a damp, earthy, natural scent, the smell of dirt and moss and trees but mostly a smell Phillip associated with prehistory: life on Earth before man, when the northwest was all forests that smelled like that and when something moved within them.

_Something empty_ , Phillip thought, _something cavernous and gaping, the negative Gordon Cole is seeking.  It was here back then, and it’s still here now._   He imagined the insectoid thing scuttling along the ground and climbing among the trees.

Then everything natural was gone, and he and Judy were walking through an interior room nothing like any convenience store Phillip had ever seen.  It was dark and dirty and papered all over with dingy floral wallpaper—even the ceiling.  There was only one door, and that door was before them; no egress lay behind them to open back upon the stairs.  Judy laid her hand on the white ceramic doorknob and turned it.

The tall wooden door swung open upon a plain room which _did_ look as if it belonged to the upper story of a convenience store: wooden floor, patched drywall, windows pasted over with old newspapers.  A table with a sickly green Formica top stood in the middle of the large, open room with an empty chair on either side of it.  Four bowls and pans had been placed on the table.  Oddly enough, they were all filled with creamed corn.  Phillip wrinkled his nose involuntarily; being from the south, he’d had to eat a lot of creamed corn growing up, and he’d never really liked it.  He had always found it cloying, slimy and too sweet.

Six people had gathered there for the meeting.  Most improbable of the six was an old lady in a long dress who half-sat, half-leaned on the arm of a grey sofa across the room from the door, in front of one of the covered windows.  Beside her on the sofa slumped a young blond boy wearing a formal suit which was, like Phillip’s own suit, a couple sizes too large for him.  As weird as the whole situation was, his face bore the universal expression of all small boys who had to behave themselves in front of their grandmothers’ friends, no matter how bored they got.

That small bit of familiarity didn’t bring Phillip much comfort, however, because of the strangeness of the others.  To the boy’s left were two adult men dressed in ragged, layered clothing with long, unkempt beards and hair.  They looked like lumberjacks or—

_Woodsmen,_ Phillip thought, _that’s what they are.  Woodsmen._   One sat on the opposite end of the sofa from the boy, with the other woodsman on a stool nearby.  Between them stood two wooden cabinets, the kind that would have once housed televisions or radios, but now the cabinets were filled with aged electronics, wires, and glass insulators.  Another man sat in an armchair to the old lady’s right, dressed like the woodsmen but without a beard.

Oddest of all, though, was the sixth figure, who kept to himself on the left side of the room.  He wore all red—red suit jacket and pants, red tie, red shirt—and although his skin was dark, his entire face had been painted stark white, even his lips and eyelids.  His nose was inhumanly long and pointed, and when he opened his mouth and screeched, his gums looked black in contrast to the paint on his face.  He seemed totally absorbed in his own activities: jumping up on and down from a plastic milk crate, and occasionally standing upon it to tilt his head back and screech again.  He clutched a slingshot in his right hand, but it had no sling, and the man seemed not to remember he was holding it.

All of them except the jumping man looked at Judy; then they all looked at Phillip.  He fidgeted, barely keeping himself from dancing in place out of nervousness, and he thought that maybe he could understand jumping around on a milk crate after all.  Being stuck in this room with those people for very long would leave him desperate to do _something_.  Phillip wondered which of them were the Arm and BOB.

Judy took Phillip’s arm and pulled him back to where some dented metal folding chairs sat against the same wall as the door.  As Phillip sat down on the chair nearest the door, Judy muttered, “They aren’t here yet.”  Phillip knew whom she meant without having to ask.  She sat on the chair beside his, crossed her legs, and folded her arms over her flat stomach.

_She’s not very happy,_ Phillip observed.  It was the last truly coherent thought he had for some time.

There was a whooping sound like the ones the Indians always made in old racist westerns; then there was a buzz of static and a flickering of the fluorescent bulbs that lit the room; then two men were sitting in the chairs at the Formica table.

The one on the left was a little person, dressed all in red like the jumping man: red suit, red shirt, red tie.

The one on the right was tall and grizzled with a long mane of grey hair trailing down his back.  He wore a denim jacket and jeans, his fingers were splayed over his thighs, and his teeth were bared in a predatory laugh.

Judy said to Phillip in a low voice, “The Arm is on the left.  BOB is on the right.”

They both looked at her.  The Arm nodded, as cordial as any southern gentleman greeting a lady, and BOB sneered.  Then they both turned their heads toward Phillip.  Phillip thought they looked hungry.

But maybe that was only MIKE’s bizarre commentary working on his mind, because after that one glance, the Arm and BOB ignored him, and the meeting began.

Phillip couldn’t have said exactly how long it lasted, but it felt like hours.  For a lot of it, they just sat, sat without speaking—except for the jumping man, who jumped and fidgeted and sometimes screeched.  Even the boy kept quiet.

But sometimes they spoke, although the Arm did most of the talking, and the old woman and the woodsmen did not speak at all.  When anyone spoke, his words sounded almost as if he were talking backwards, but not quite; Phillip could still understand the words if he concentrated.  Judy did not say anything, nor did she move.  Phillip wasn’t sure either how much time passed between the odd statements the little man uttered.  Time hardly seemed to matter anymore in that strange, dismal room.

“The chrome reflects our image,” said the Arm.  Somehow, out of all of them, he seemed the most human.  The jumping man chittered and shrieked in monkey-like noises, and the one called BOB writhed on his chair with his head tilted back, eyes closed, and teeth bared in a snarl like a barely-restrained canine.  When the lights flickered and went out entirely, the woodsmen adjusted the equipment beside them, and the other, beardless man wheezed, “Eeeeelectricity.”

Ignoring all this, the Arm raised his intensely blue eyes upward and looked about him at his compatriots as he mused, “From pure air, we have descended.”

_From pure air,_ Phillip thought, _Buenos Aires._   He glanced over at Judy, but her face was turned toward the little man in red.  From behind her sunglasses, she watched him, as did the woodsmen, the boy, the grandmother, the electrician.  BOB grinned at the ceiling.  The jumping man jumped and chittered.

The Arm looked around at them all, nodding, and repeated, “From pure air.”  His wide eyes fixed upon BOB seated across the table from him, and the other man slowly lowered his head as if reluctant but compelled.  His eyes opened to brown slits, and his teeth showed only partially in a grimace.  The Arm smiled, almost gently, and said, “Going up and down.  Intercourse between. . . .”

Then he stopped.  His brow furrowed and he frowned as if in thought before he finally finished, “The two worlds.”

“Animal life,” declared the electrician, as if contributing to the one-sided conversation, but the Arm ignored him.  He had already turned toward the bowls of creamed corn on the table, and his pinched face relaxed and brightened with the promise of hunger to be satisfied.

He exclaimed, “ _Garmonbozia!_ ” and BOB closed his eyes with an even deeper grimace. . . the look of hunger denied and desire left unfulfilled.

But Phillip was hardly aware of BOB at that moment, for his mind was fully occupied with contemplating _garmonbozia_.  It was no real word as far as he knew, yet even as the Arm spoke it, Phillip understood what it was.  It was the creamed corn there on the table, but it was also pain and suffering, sorrow, fear, hatred and anger, anguish, sadness and misery.  Now Phillip knew what MIKE had meant when he said that BOB and the Arm wanted to devour Phillip—they wanted to eat not his flesh but his emotions.  His fear.  His pain.

“This is a Formica table.  Green is its color,” the Arm said when he next spoke.  He smiled down at the table and ran his small hands over its mottled surface, smooth except for a ragged hole in the jade-colored laminate about the size of the stone set into the ring Phillip still wore.  Phillip looked down at the ring, and the room began to grow dark again.  The woodsmen tended to their equipment.  The jumping man whined and fidgeted.

BOB’s mouth drew back in a rictus, and he finally opened his eyes wide as he growled at the Arm sitting across the table, “I have the fury of my own momentum!”  The look of hatred on his grizzled face and in his dark eyes was terrifying—not that Phillip feared for his own safety, exactly, but BOB’s hatred was like the _garmonbozia_.  It made Phillip fear for _humanity._   If the Arm looked the most human out of them all, BOB looked the least because of his feral expression.  “Animal life,” the electrician had said—and that animal life was BOB.

The Arm stared back at BOB with something like fear on his peaked face.  Judy shifted as if she were about to stand, but the Arm lifted his right hand toward her without looking.  The gesture said, _You won’t need to interfere. . . I think._

Phillip’s heart thundered in his chest and throat and ears.  He looked at Judy again and thought, _Who are you?  And who is BOB?  Why is he different from the others, more vicious and more wild—and why are **you** the one who can control him?_

_Who are you?  Who is Judy? **Who is Judy?**_

The answer that came to Phillip, an answer that offered no comfort, was from the ridiculous song he had recalled in Buenos Aires: _Judy in disguise, what you aiming for?  You’re a circus of horrors, well that’s what you are._

As BOB sat seething in his own momentum, whatever made him different from the others, the young blond boy in his too-big suit lifted his right hand to point at the grizzled man.

“Fell a victim,” said the boy.

The Arm let his hand drop back on the table, and he said, “With this ring, I thee wed.”  Phillip curled his fingers down over Judy’s ring on his right hand.  BOB began to laugh, and the Arm laughed with him.  Their laughter sounded horrible, as stilted and backwards as their speech.

Then all the amusement dropped from the little man’s face as suddenly as it had come.  He stared at BOB and commanded, “Fire walk with me.”  BOB’s grin morphed back into a snarl, and he lifted his hands above his head to clap them together, once.  At the sound, also somehow muffled and backwards, flames sprouted up from the floor around BOB’s chair.  The fire rose about him and cast a flickering glow on the face of the Arm.

And then they were gone.  They left without devouring Phillip, but maybe there was a little more creamed corn in the bowls than before.

“Let _him_ walk with the fire,” Judy had told Phillip.  Was BOB the fire?  Where were he and the Arm walking now?  He turned to Judy, but she stood without looking at him.

“It is time to go,” she said.

But then, another person entered the room—walked in, through the same tall door Judy and Phillip had used.  Phillip turned to see the one-armed man who had warned him about the Arm and BOB. . . and “her.”

MIKE glanced down at Phillip, then focused all his attention on Judy.  She had spun to face him with her lips pressed tightly in anger.  MIKE carried something in his single hand, and he set it down on the Formica table.  It was a tin can whose lid had been jaggedly sawed open.  The can was empty.

He said, “BOB did this.  I had some of the corn canned, and BOB stole it from us!”

“From _you_ ,” said Judy in a flat voice.  “ _I_ don’t eat it.”

“From _us_ ,” MIKE repeated with a gesture toward the other side of the room, where the rest still sat or, in one case, jumped.  “ _And_ from you—because do you know _why_ he stole it?”

Judy sighed with a brisk, impatient sound and shifted her weight from foot to foot before she responded, “Greed.  Hunger.  Lust for the power it gives him.  The same reason you and the Arm consume it.  The same reason you make BOB gather it for you and then deny him all but a little of it.”

Phillip stared at her.  Her tone lacked any emotion, yet her words conveyed pity for that. . . _creature_.

“Hmm,” MIKE hummed, unmoved.  “More than that.  He wants more _garmonbozia_ to grow stronger, and he wants to grow stronger because of _her_.”

“Her,” said Judy.  The annoyed expression drained from her face, and she stopped fidgeting.  Her whole body went very still.

MIKE went on, “He wants enough strength to leave his current host and enter _her_.  He wants to _be_ her, because then he won’t have to fear me anymore.  He won’t have to fear _you_.”  The one-armed man took a step toward Judy so that they stood face to face, only inches apart, yet she did not move back or otherwise react.  MIKE stared into the blank convex surfaces of Judy’s glasses and spoke quietly, “BOB wants to become the Moonchild and end you.”

Judy’s face was as still as the smooth green tabletop where the bowls of creamed corn sat, growing cold and tacky.

“Let me help her,” said MIKE.  “Let me stop him—”

“You tell me what to do?”  Judy’s voice rose in volume and dropped in timbre as she spoke.  For the moment, Phillip forgot everything in the room except for her and for MIKE.  Judy absorbed Phillip’s attention, as well as MIKE’s.  Her voice and her face, her stillness, absorbed everything.

MIKE stood quietly and faced the small, dark-haired woman as she reached her right hand up and grasped the bright red stem of her sunglasses.  Phillip drew in a sharp breath of the room’s stale air, and his heart pounded with unexpected anxiety.  After angling to see the woman’s eyes the entire brief time they’d known each other, suddenly he didn’t want to know what lay behind those glasses.

But Judy whipped off the sunglasses and dropped them to the dusty wood-plank floor, where they landed with a muted clatter.  In spite of his apprehension, Phillip looked up at Judy and found he couldn’t see her eyes after all: a black mist swathed the part of her face the glasses had concealed.  It was not smoke but appeared to be actual mist or fog, except it was literally, completely black and it was coming out of a woman’s eyes.

_No,_ thought Phillip as he squirmed backwards in his chair, feet skidding on the floor for purchase when he tried to push even farther away.   _It ain’t comin’ out of her eyes, ‘cos I don’t think she’s **got** any eyes.  She wears those glasses ‘cos she ain’t got any eyes a’tall._   His hands clenched over the edges of his chair, and he bit down hard on the inside of his lower lip to keep from moaning.

All that took maybe a second or two, and by then, the mist had spread over Judy’s face to cover it.  MIKE’s hand curled into a fist against his leg, and it shook a little.  Judy was shaking too, but not in the same way.  Instead, she seemed to be _flickering_ , as if her whole body was jerking in and out of existence, or leaving and returning to the room as BOB and the Arm had, but in half-second intervals.  Past them, beyond the table in the center of the room, the others watched in silence.  Even the jumping man stood without moving.

The mist rapidly swept over Judy’s whole body to hide it all before beginning to dissolve.  As the mist dissipated, Phillip’s brain at first refused to process the electric signals his eyes sent it.  He saw Judy as a series of surreal objects, one instant a graceful white horse, then another instant a round, red balloon floating there beside the table.  Then, finally, Phillip comprehended what she truly looked like as the mist drifted to the floor and gathered at her feet.  She flickered a few seconds more before steadying.

When Phillip opened his mouth to whisper his horror, he felt blood trickle from his bitten lip down toward his chin.

“No. . . _Judy._ ”

She was the negative force the Blue Rose team sought.  Phillip would have known it even if he had never seen her sigil, because looking at her now gave him a crawling, gnawing sensation in the pit of his stomach that made him long to be sick, because even nausea would be better than the nothingness he felt now.  _Anything_ would be better than the nothingness that was. . . _her_.

The diamond in the sigil was her faceless head, and the two carats on its sides were the two short antennae that sprung from her brow.  Judy was the insect thing Phillip had imagined staring eyelessly at him, scuttling among the gardens of thorny blue roses. . . and devouring everything just as MIKE had said she would: _She will devour you and feel nothing because she is empty without hungering._  

A mouth to devour was the one facial feature she _did_ have: a huge, gaping, black hole of a mouth that consumed the lower half of her face.  Beyond the mouth, Judy’s visage held no eyes or nose, nothing save for the antennae.  Her head was shaped like the elongated skulls archeologists found in Peru and Egypt, but even those had been humanoid, with normal-sized mouths and cavities where eyes and noses had been.

As Judy’s head seemed completely alien, so did her skin: it was purely white.  Not Caucasian “white,” but chalk white, snow white, every tired cliché of white Phillip could think of.  Yet the rest of her, from the neck down, looked human.  She was naked, taller than she had been in disguise, taller even than Phillip now.  She had broad, shapely shoulders; small breasts; flat abdomen; wide waist and hips; muscular thighs; long, graceful arms and legs.  Phillip observed all this with a lingering glance before jerking his eyes guiltily back up to Judy’s strange head.

“You will not give _me_ your orders,” Judy said to MIKE.  Her voice had not changed so much as the rest of her, only deepened and roughed a little.  Phillip could still recognize it.

MIKE replied carefully, “I only ask that you. . . allow me to help the girl, the Moonchild, so that he cannot have her.  I want him punished for stealing from me—and I will keep _her_ away from _you_.”

_The Moonchild?_ Phillip wondered.  He’d read Aleister Crowley’s tedious novel by that name years ago.  Phillip didn’t remember much about it, except that there had been two warring groups of magicians. . . a Black Lodge of dark mages, and a White Lodge of light.

“Do what you will,” Judy spat at MIKE, “but yes, keep _her_ away from me.  Or else I will take her and fling her to the far ends of existence—and I will rip _you_ to pieces.”  She suddenly rounded on the rest of them, the odd assortment of spirits watching their exchange with varying degrees of apprehension but little surprise.  They, like MIKE, must have seen Judy like this before.

“I will destroy you _all!_ ” she roared at them, and her whole body flickered in and out, back and forth.  “Leave me— _go!_ ”

One by one they vanished, except for the old lady and the boy who faded from Phillip’s sight together.  The woman gave Judy a disapproving look as she disappeared; like the boy’s earlier bored expression, it was familiar to Phillip.  His own grandmother, a very proper lady of the Old South, had mastered that look as a way of expressing her displeasure without words.

When the others were gone, Judy turned back to MIKE.  Her shoulders heaved with anger and the rest of her flickered and jerked.  Then her ponderous head shifted toward Phillip, and her antennae both lifted and pointed in his direction as he entered her awareness once more.  Fear shook him so hard, he could not even try to move farther away from her.  Instead, he sat where he was, and the metal chair rattled with the force of his trembling.

“Phillip,” Judy said.  He watched her gaping mouth form his name, then, “I told you not to come.”  That was so like something her old, human self would have said, it made him think of her like that: touching his face and saying she liked his eyes; trembling when he held her hands and kissed one of them. 

Judy didn’t frighten Phillip when he remembered those things.  He looked up at her mouth and the eyeless plane of her face and her antennae, and he realized there was still something beautiful about her.

“Judy,” he managed to choke out.  He pushed himself up to his feet and stumbled toward her.

When Phillip reached them, MIKE spoke abruptly, reciting a quiet and mostly nonsensical litany: “This is the water, and this is the well.  Drink full and descend.  The horse is the white of the eyes, and dark within.”  Phillip felt himself being lulled into complacence.  Relaxing.

_Snap out of it!_ he scolded himself.  _You’re fucked enough as it is, you need what little guard you got left._   So Phillip looked at Judy as he focused on the meaning of MIKE’s words—the white horse, and the darkness within her.  Although Judy was the negative force the Blue Rose team sought, she was more than they had ever suspected, too.  Even when Phillip had guessed that the messages intercepted by Major Briggs at the LPA had come from that extreme negative, he hadn’t imagined anything like this.  He hadn’t imagined anything like _her_.

When MIKE began to repeat his chant, Judy rounded on him and snarled, “ _Go!_ ”  MIKE vanished, instantly, as the Arm and BOB had.

Left alone with her, close to her, Phillip felt a resurgence of his fear.  Now, though, it was too late for him to do anything but stand there and look up at her.  How she could see him as she turned her head back toward him, Phillip did not know.  Maybe she sensed through the antennae.

“I’ve kept my part of our arrangement, Phillip,” the creature called Judy informed him.  Her strange mouth articulated the words clearly, and Phillip stared at her mouth in absent fascination.  “Are you going to keep your part?”

“Yeah,” he muttered, “but. . . .”

When he trailed off, Judy growled, “But _what_?”

Phillip groaned, “It wasn’t supposed to be like this!  You were s’posed to be my contact, not my target.  It wasn’t s’posed to be _you_.”  He shook his head slowly, aware that he was trembling again as he stammered, “It wasn’t s’posed to be someone. . . _beautiful_.”

Judy was very still again, and something about the way she held her antennae crooked toward him made Phillip feel like she stared at him, even without eyes.  Then she breathed in her low voice, “Go.  Go and give your friend the ring and forget.”

“Forget?” Phillip gasped in a bitter laugh.  “How the hell you think I can just _forget_?  Forget those lunatics and the, the _corn_ and this?”  He gestured wildly at the dingy room around them, then at Judy herself.  “Forget _you_?  Judy, I ain’t _ever_ gonna forget.”

Judy lifted her white hands, and Phillip noticed with a jolt that her hands seemed to be on backwards.  When she grasped his head in them, her thumbs lay along his jaws, while her smallest fingers brushed his temples.  He trembled in her grip, and when Judy leaned down and fairly lunged at him, Phillip thought, _She’s gonna bite my damn face off._

But instead, Judy dropped her forehead down to rest against Phillip’s and touched the tips of her antennae to his brow.  They felt like points of heat on his skin, and it took him a moment to realize that Judy was speaking through them.  What she said stunned him, for it was familiar, something Phillip had read in the Upanishads not so long ago when he finally gave in to Gordon Cole’s urgings and perused them:

_You are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives inside the dream._

The thought came from Judy to Phillip not in words but as a whole, complete concept.  Judy then spoke another to him: _But it is my dream.  It is a bad dream, and I cannot wake.  They are all part of my nightmare, and so are you, Phillip Jeffries.  If you dare to come near me again, I truly will devour you._

Her declaration felt like a punch to his gut.  Judy was the eternal negative (and now he understood that her true name was not even Judy but something like Jowday, and even that was just a name the nameless force had given herself), and he was nothing to her—to be nothing to nothing, to be a nightmare’s nightmare. . . .  Phillip still knew he couldn’t forget, but how he wanted to!

He struggled to pull away from her, but she held him fast in the grip of her malformed hands.  He could feel no warmth in them nor in her forehead, no breath from her gaping mouth.  Judy had no scent, and he imagined that if he felt for her pulse, she would have none.  The only life in her seemed to be the heat from her antennae tips.

_Let me go,_ Phillip thought at Judy.  Unlike her, he spoke his thoughts in words, fumbling and awkward.  _You want to drive me away, then let me go and send me home!_

He felt hesitation from her; then another complete idea tumbled into his mind.  It did not make sense in the context of her disregard for him:

_be careful Phillip / beware of BOB / he may pursue you_

Judy showed him BOB in four guises: the crazed, long-haired man who had appeared at the meeting; a completely different man with short, rumpled brown hair and a wide, manic smile; the same man but with hair gone completely white; and a third, unsmiling man with black hair and dark, soulless eyes.

_Be careful_ , Judy told Phillip again.  Then she drew back, releasing the hold of her hands and breaking the contact between her antennae and his brow.

“Go and forget,” Judy said aloud with her terrible mouth, and Phillip awoke.

\--

He lay on the futon in Judy’s apartment.  Phillip sat up to take stock of himself and his surroundings.  He still wore the green and gold on his right hand.  His carry-on bag sat on the floor where he’d placed it.  He was alone in the apartment.

“It was a dream,” Phillip muttered to himself.  He raked his hand through his hair, felt the ring catch on a few strands, and frowned.  “She was a dream.”

He got to his feet and had to brace himself on the tall dresser when a wave of dizziness made him feel close to fainting, what they’d always called “getting up too fast” back home.  When the dizziness passed, Phillip looked around and found the phone in the kitchenette.  He called for a taxi to the airport, where he planned to get a flight to Philadelphia.

_I gotta see Gordon,_ Phillip thought through a dull haze as he hung up the phone.  _I gotta tell him. . . tell him. . . oh Jesus Lord what the hell **am** I gonna tell him?_

He looked around the apartment with its scant furniture, its complete lack of any evidence that a woman named Judy had ever lived there.  In fact, Phillip had no evidence that Judy had ever existed at all—until he remembered that he’d brought her letter from Buenos Aires.  Phillip shoved his hand into his suit jacket and fumbled until he found the crumpled piece of paper.  He pulled it out, half expecting it to be blank, but no, the text was still there, written in that neat schoolgirl cursive which seemed so at odds with what Judy really was.

_I will be there at six, in a red dress._

Phillip told himself, _Maybe it was a dream, but she’s still real, and I ain’t giving her up to the Bureau, not even to Gordon.  Not even if I’m part of her nightmare._

He picked up his carry-on and went to the door, but he stopped before he left the apartment.  Phillip set down the bag and used his left hand to pull off the ring he was wearing on his right.  He looked for a moment at the sigil on the ring before laying it atop the dresser.  Then he scooped up his bag again and went out the door, walked down the hall, and stepped onto the groaning elevator.

\--

To be continued


	6. Chapter 6

**Philadelphia, PA  
198?**

As Phillip got off the elevator on the seventh floor, he heard a strange, low sound—a creaking groan something like an unoiled hinge but with a note of anguish in it.  _Like the door of a haunted house full of lonely ghosts,_ he thought.

When he strode down the hall toward Gordon Cole’s office, he moved with what would have looked like confidence to anyone watching on the security camera mounted on the ceiling.  On the flight from Seattle, he’d planned out exactly what he’d tell Gordon, after all, right down to the last word.

But Phillip’s hands were clenched into fists at his sides, and his shoulders knotted with tension.  He forced himself to relax—physically, anyway, because mentally he was tense as a piano wire—when he made the turn into the shorter side hall leading into Gordon’s office.  He slowed his walk as he entered the office, beginning to bounce a little.  Instead of fighting it, he let it happen, let himself dance to the relentless beat of the music in his head: _come to me tonight, come to me tonight, taking everything in sight—_

“Gordon!” he heard someone else calling on Phillip’s way in.  “Gordon?”

Phillip’s old friend and partner was sitting at his desk, but he rose to his feet, staring, as Phillip half-walked, half-danced in to stand in the center of the room.  Out of the corner of his eye, Phillip saw Albert getting up from his own desk to the left, but Albert didn’t matter.  Gordon was the only one that mattered, Gordon and what Phillip had to say to him.  Phillip had carefully planned that statement out, and it was already trying to drain right out of his head.  He didn’t have any attention to spare for Albert Rosenfield.

“Phillip?  Is that you?” Gordon was shout-speaking, and then Albert said his name too.  Phillip looked at Albert, then back at Gordon, and everything he’d been going to say evaporated.  They were staring at him, both of them, and then he could hear footsteps coming up behind him and another man he’d never seen before—a very young man with black hair and dark eyes—walked around him in a semi-circle, even going so far as to walk backwards so he could keep staring when he got around to Phillip’s front.

They all just stared, _stared_ , like Phillip looked as strange to them as the madmen above the convenience store had looked to him. . . as if he had _become_ one of the madmen, and they knew it.  He stood there clasping his hands in front of him, chafing the silver bracelet he wore on his right wrist, trying to remember what he needed to tell Gordon.  Something about Seattle, something about the meeting and BOB and the Arm.  Something about _her_ —

“Cooper?” Gordon yelled at the young man.  “Meet the long-lost Phillip Jeffries!  You may have heard of him at the Academy.”  He spoke as if Phillip were some interesting animal in a zoo.

Yeah, something in a zoo.  Something trapped and contained, something _imprisoned_.  It reminded Phillip of why he _couldn’t_ tell Gordon about her.  And even if Phillip couldn’t remember everything else he _did_ need to say just yet, that was a good enough place to start.

“Well, now,” Phillip said to all three of them with a shake of his finger for emphasis, “I’m not gonna talk about Judy.  In fact, we’re not gonna talk about Judy at all.”

The dark-haired man’s eyes went wide, and he turned to gasp, “Gordon!”  It clicked then, who he was and the fact that Phillip _had_ seen him before, but Gordon made a placating gesture at the younger man and said to him, “I know, Coop, stand fast.”

That confirmed what Gordon’s stare had suggested: Phillip couldn’t trust him anymore.  Phillip had been betrayed, replaced by someone younger while he was off doing his job, chasing down Judy and her “contacts.”  Obviously, Gordon hadn’t expected him to come back so soon and find it out, or maybe he hadn’t expected Phillip to come back at all.  But he didn’t know just what he’d replaced Phillip with, now did he?

Phillip pointed at the man Gordon had called “Coop” and sneered, “Who do you think that is there?”

“Suffered some bumps on the old noggin, eh, Phil?” muttered Albert.  It was the kind of thing Albert always said, especially about Phillip, and the kind of thing Phillip didn’t let bother him under normal circumstances, much less when he had more important matters to concern him.

“What the hell did he say, Albert?” Gordon shouted; then he turned to Phillip and went on, “That’s Special Agent Dale Cooper!  Where in the hell have you been, Jeffries?”

Phillip smiled as he walked past Albert, between him and the man Gordon called Dale Cooper, over to Gordon’s desk.  The smile was mostly a rueful one, because he was remembering the fourth face of BOB Judy had shown him: the unsmiling man with black hair and dark, soulless eyes.  He was older, with longer hair and a harder face, but “Special Agent Dale Cooper” was—or someday would be—one of BOB’s hosts.

In answer to Gordon’s last question, Phillip said as he leaned over his desk, “I sure as hell wanna tell you everything, but I ain’t got a whole lot to go on.  But I _will_ tell you one little bitty thing: Judy is positive about this.”  He looked from Gordon to Albert as he spoke, before he stopped himself.  Phillip wasn’t sure what he was saying, wasn’t sure what he was even _trying_ to say.  Even if Gordon really had thrown him over, Phillip still had to warn him—about the meeting, about the Arm, and especially about BOB.

Albert said flatly, “How interesting.  I thought we were gonna leave Judy out of—”

“Albert,” Gordon cut him off.  Phillip’s legs suddenly felt like they were going to give out, and he braced himself on Gordon’s desk with both hands as they wobbled.  Cooper pulled a chair up behind Phillip, and Gordon put a hand on his arm to guide him into it.  Even Albert reached out to help.

“Sit down, Jeffries,” Gordon urged in as quiet a voice as Gordon could ever manage.  Now they were treating Phillip more like a mental case than a zoo exhibit, but he couldn’t really blame them for that.  He sounded crazy and he knew it, so he spoke as calmly and reasonably as he could.

“Listen.  Listen up, and listen carefully.  I been to one of their meetings,” Phillip explained.  “It was above a convenience store.”  He pointed upward to illustrate, yet when he looked in the direction of his own finger, he saw only the ceiling, and he realized how little sense he was making.  He slumped back in his chair, finger still extended.

“ _Whose_ meeting?” Albert demanded as he stalked over to stand beside Phillip and glare down at him with folded arms.  “Where have you _been_?”

“Jeffries, you’ve been gone damn near two years!” Gordon shouted with his typical hyperbole.

Phillip glanced at him, then turned back to Albert, who was closer to him.  He looked up into Albert’s stern, skeptical face and told him with pleading desperation, “It was a _dream._   We live inside a _dream_.”  Phillip reached up his left hand and placed it over Albert’s heart, trying to impart somehow what Judy had shown him with the prodigious mind beneath her little antennae.

But when Phillip let his hand drop, Albert only looked from Phillip to Gordon and then Cooper before muttering, “And it’s raining Post Toasties.”

Despairing of any way to make them understand, Phillip turned away from Albert in misery; then he shouted in frustration.

“ _Hell God baby damn no!_ ”  Phillip opened and closed his mouth soundlessly before trying one final time to explain: “I _found_ something, in Seattle, at Judy’s.  And then. . . there they were.  And they sat quietly for hours.  And I _followed!_ ”  He turned to look up at Gordon again as he spoke this last, hoping to find some answering expression of encouragement or warmth or understanding on his old friend’s face.  However, Phillip saw nothing but bewilderment and incomprehension. . . the look of a man who had replaced him and then moved on.

_I’m alone now_ , Phillip thought, dropping his eyes.   _Alone with the memory of them and their meeting, BOB and the Arm and the **garmonbozia**. . . and her._   When he remembered seeing Judy’s true face for the first time—her white skin and her black mouth—he gave a strangled moan and dropped his head down onto Gordon’s desk.

“Ohh, ohh, ohhhh. . . ,” Phillip groaned as he shook his head slightly so that the curve of his brow bone rocked on the wood.  His teeth scraped over the sore on his lip, and it began to ooze blood again.  He muttered, “Ring. . . the ring.”

He should have kept Judy’s ring instead of leaving it behind.  Kept it and given it to Gordon and the consequences be damned.  Gordon would have believed him _then._

“Albert, I’ll take that second mineral water,” Gordon said as loudly and cheerfully as ever, probably thinking he was being tactful.  Phillip didn’t give a damn about Albert.  Albert could go to hell.  Phillip had already been there, and he’d come back, and nobody believed him.  But he saw Albert withdraw without speaking; then Gordon leaned over him and shouted, “Phillip, let’s calm down here and get all this interesting story on paper.”  Still placating, still patronizing, but at least. . . at least willing to listen?

Phillip heard Gordon jiggling the button on the intercom that sat on the far side of his desk, and his voice at a distance calling, “Hello?  Hello?”

And then the lights began to flicker.

“Hello!  Give me some good news!” Gordon bellowed into the intercom, but Phillip barely heard him.  He lifted his head so that only his chin rested on the desk, and his mind went back to that room above the convenience store, where the lights went dim and the woodsmen adjusted their devices when BOB came and went.

“Cooper, the device has gone faulty,” Gordon told the young agent, who turned and jogged from the room after Albert.  Gordon called into the intercom, “Can anybody hear me?  Mayday!  Mayday!”

“May. . . ,” Phillip murmured while the lights flickered in and out and Gordon jiggled the intercom button with a squeaky rattle.  Phillip’s mismatched eyes moved over Gordon’s desk until they fell on the daily calendar and he saw what date it read.

“February. . . _1989?_ ”  His eyes flicked up to Gordon, wide with shock.

_You’ve been gone damn near two years._   It hadn’t been hyperbole at all.

As soon as Phillip realized that, he was gone again.

\--

**Buenos Aires, Argentina  
1987 (IV)**

He was surrounded and confined by a hot, moist darkness; then the darkness vomited him forth and he burned with nausea that nearly bent him double and fire that racked his whole body with agony.  Phillip hunched forward and screamed until he realized that the pain had ceased.  He still thought he was going to be sick, and he folded his arms over his stomach and coughed.  When nothing came up, the sick feeling finally passed, and Phillip raised his head.

Two people were staring at him: a woman wearing a maid’s uniform crouched on the floor of the hallway he was facing, and a man in a loud tropical shirt.  Phillip had no idea who they were, or where he was—except that it wasn’t the Bureau headquarters in Philadelphia—but he didn’t care.  They were human beings, and that was all that mattered to him.  He reached out his left hand to them, over the bannister of the staircase where he crouched.  As he did so, he caught sight of the bracelet on his wrist, the bracelet which he always wore on his _right_ arm.  Somehow, it had changed sides all on its own.

“What?” Phillip tried to ask the two people, wanting to know why they appeared to be utterly terrified of him.  His voice had a strange quality to it, even to his own ears: overloud and reverberating, as if spoken into a megaphone.  The woman crawled out of his sight, onto what appeared to be an elevator, and the man said something with a pained look on his face.  Phillip couldn’t hear him over the ringing echo of his own voice in his ears.  But as he stared at the man and his loud shirt, it all suddenly clicked into place.

This was the Palm Deluxe, in Buenos Aires.  That man was the bellhop who had taken Phillip up to his room the day he checked in and met Judy a week and a day ago.  Two years ago?  A lifetime ago?

A few minutes ago: Phillip’s suitcase lay on the floor at the bellhop’s feet.  Phillip hadn’t even been to his room yet.

He began to shake.  He could feel a drop of blood running from his bitten lip down towards his chin, and he remembered Judy scolding him, “Don’t make yourself bleed.  You’ll attract attention,” but that never happened because he hadn’t met her yet.  He hadn’t even read her letter yet; the envelope was in his suit jacket, unopened.

“ _¡Santa María!_ ” cried the bellhop.  “Where did you go?”

Phillip drew back the hand he had still been reaching out, and he made a choked noise of anguish which reverberated as his first cry had done.  The bellhop wailed “ _¡Ayúdeme!_   _¡Ayúdeme!_ ” as Phillip staggered to his feet and looked around for someone to help _him_ , looked for help where none was to be found.

Something had happened to him he would never be able to explain, and even if he _could_ explain it, no one would ever believe him.  He knew that now, because the one man who might have listened had turned on him and called it nothing more than an “interesting story”—right before BOB had swallowed Phillip up and vomited him out back at the beginning of the whole bad dream, where Phillip’s fear and suffering would only continue to grow greater and greater in an infinite loop with no escape.

Phillip closed his eyes and screamed.

\--

To be continued


	7. Chapter 7

**Buenos Aires, Argentina  
1987 (V)**

“It appeared to be the same name, but the spelling was different: Joudy. Carved, not written, deeply and hurriedly, with what appears to have been a pocketknife. Next to the phone. As if he’d heard something on a call and had to carve it right there on the wall. Not with a pen or a pencil, but a knife. Why would someone do that? Because this information upset him? Because it affected him to such a degree that only a weapon could express the depth and intensity of whatever he was feeling at the time?”

\--FBI Agent Tamara Preston

\--

When Phillip’s screams faded from his hoarse throat, he was alone.  The bellhop had disappeared, maybe down the elevator with the maid, and all that was left in the hall was Phillip’s bag and his room key on its plastic keychain, which the bellhop had apparently dropped in his fright.  Phillip stumbled down the steps and over to his bag; then he turned to look back at the spot where he had been standing.

An oval-shaped patch of soot, exactly Phillip’s height, blackened the wall behind the stairs.  It looked as if a small explosion had gone off there, or a fire had burned in that exact spot.

 _Fire walk with me,_ he thought, and he had to suppress the hysterical urge to laugh.  He bit his lip until the urge passed, then knelt to pick up his suitcase and the key.  His hand shook so violently, he had a hard time making out the room number printed on the tag.  When he finally read it, he wasn’t surprised to find it was the same room he’d had before.

Phillip didn’t really believe that going to his room would make anything better, but he didn’t know what else to do.  Even if he could make it downstairs to the lobby, he would only meet the same reaction the bellhop had given him—stares, shouts, pleas of _ayúdeme_ when Phillip was the one who needed help.

Phillip stood there looking at the staircase where he had reached out towards two other human beings, weeping, begging for kind of contact, and they had rejected him, just as Gordon and Albert had rejected him in Philadelphia before that. . . if Philadelphia hadn’t all been a dream too.

 _Maybe **I’m** the dream,_ Phillip thought.  _Maybe I’m what’s not real, and that’s why I feel so alone._   But just in case any of it _was_ real, he shouldn’t stand around in the hall because the bellhop might have gone after the hotel security.

He found his room and let himself in, then locked the safety bolt behind him.  Of course the hotel manager would have his room number in the ledger and could come after Phillip if he really wanted to, but Phillip hoped he would just write it off to “Mr. Jeffries”—and possibly the bellhop and maid—having had too much to drink.

“Yeah, and what about all the shit on the wall?” Phillip muttered to himself as he dropped his suitcase on the floor and tossed the room key on a round wicker table near the door.  “Maybe I tried to set myself on fire.  Yeah.  Put the repairs on my bill.”  He snorted with a suppressed laugh and looked down at himself, his light-colored linen suit and hands; then he shuffled over to where a large mirror hung on a wall.

Phillip looked no better or worse than he had expected: sweaty, eyes red-rimmed with dark circles beneath them, hair stiff with sweat and oil and gel, congealed and dried blood smeared from his lip all the way down his chin.  No burns, no soot, nothing to suggest the fire that had left its mark on the Palm Deluxe’s wall.  He met his own eyes in the mirror, one ice blue and the other brown.

Whatever had happened—dream or not, fire or not—he was filthy and sweaty, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d showered.  Phillip started to shrug out of his jacket; then he froze as he thought about the letter he had tucked inside it.  He’d forgotten all about it since getting to his room, but upon remembering, he felt desperate to open and read it.  It was the only proof he had that it _wasn’t_ all a dream or his own insanity.

Phillip felt inside his jacket’s inner pocket and found it empty.  He fumbled in the pocket on the other side, even though he knew he hadn’t put it there, then took the jacket off entirely and spread it open over the table top to search it.  There was no envelope, no letter at all.

He thought the hysteria was going to win and he was going to start laughing again, but his shoulders shook with choked sobs instead.  No letter.  None of it ever happened—all of it had been a dream, or a hallucination.  Phillip had been working too hard, thinking too much about the Blue Rose cases and this contact he was supposed to meet. . . getting too deep into his obsession with the occult, reading too many weird books.  Books like _Moonchild_.

“Albert always said I was gonna snap one day,” Phillip said to the silk lining of his jacket as his tears dripped down to stain it.  “He gon’ be sorry he missed it.”

Yet despite his own words and everything logic told him, Phillip knew _something_ had happened.  Maybe Judy wasn’t real, but she had existed all the same.  She had existed for _him_.

He muttered under his breath, “And I ain’t gonna let anything erase that.  Even if I lose it completely.”  He dug around until he found his pocket knife, sunk to the very bottom of the too-big pocket in his too-big pants.  As he unfolded the knife, Phillip looked around the room, then chose a spot just above the telephone sitting on the nightstand.

Phillip pressed the tip of the knife into cream-colored paint on the wall, and it sank in to the drywall underneath.  He pressed harder, sunk the knife in deeper, and sawed it downwards, over, upwards into a hook on the “J” he was carving.  Phillip pulled the knife out and blew off the dust he’d created; then he gouged a line across the top of the “J” just to be sure it couldn’t be misread.

But what next—Jowday, the true name she gave her herself, or Judy, the corrupted version he knew her as?  He started carving out an “o” but even before he’d finished, he was shaking his head and murmuring to himself, “No, no, she was _Judy_.  She was real, and she was _Judy_.”  With no way to take back the “o,” Phillip left it and went on with the rest of her name.

When he was done, the word “Joudy” was carved into the wall, and Phillip decided it was as valid a name for her as any.

He folded his knife and dropped it into his pocket before turning away from the wall.  Now Phillip felt numb as he finished undressing: taking his gun out of his holster and laying it on top of his jacket on the table, then pulling off his boots and pants and briefs and the colorful floral shirt he felt like he’d been wearing for weeks.  All of it but the gun landed on the floor.  He clasped his cuff bracelet in his right hand and wriggled his left wrist until it was free, then dropped it on top of the jacket too.

Phillip trudged into the bathroom and started the shower.  Before he got in, he saw himself again, this time in the bathroom mirror.  It wasn’t his face that caught his attention but his necklace, which he hadn’t even noticed as he undressed.  Now Phillip’s eyes fell on the gold cross reflected in the mirror, and he traced its shape against his breastbone with his fingertips.

He asked himself, _What if I ain’t crazy?  If I ain’t, if it’s all real, then where was God above that convenience store?_   He wrapped his long fingers around the pendant and thought, _To hell with the store, I need Him with me in this here room, right now.  Ain’t nobody else gonna help me._

Phillip stepped into the shower and stood under the hot water until steam built up around him between the curtain and the shower wall.  Finally, he ripped the paper cover off the new bar of soap in the dish and began scrubbing the soap over his body.  He used the washcloth to clean his face, making sure to wipe the blood from his chin, then dumped the entire tiny, complementary bottle of shampoo into his hair, scrubbed his fingers through it, and rinsed it clean.

When he’d finished washing, Phillip felt better.  Not good by a long shot, but better.  He shut off the water and stood there dripping amidst the steam a moment before stepping out and draping a towel over his shoulders.  He dried them slowly, lifted the towel up to rub it over again his hair, lowered it to his chest.

After drying off, Phillip dropped the towel on the floor and trudged out of the bathroom.  He retrieved his gun and brought it over to the bed with him, then placed it on the nightstand before he got in bed.  Not that he really believed the gun would be much use against BOB or Judy or whatever else might be pursuing him—if, of course, Phillip hadn’t simply lost his mind—but having it there might help him rest easier.  Or rest at all.

Phillip lay on the bed much as he had before on this same day, at this very same time, in a when that had never happened.  Except that Phillip was naked now, with the bedclothes pulled up to his chest and the pillowcase absorbing the moisture from his damp hair, it all _was_ the same: him stretched out flat on his back with his mismatched eyes fixed on the ceiling and his arms resting at his sides.  Tapping his fingertips against the bedspread to the beat of the music in his head.

But no, a couple more things were different.  He wasn’t waiting for six o’clock to come so he could go down to the bar and meet a woman in a red dress.  And the song stuck in Phillip’s head had changed as well:

 _Judy in disguise, what you aiming for?_  
_A circus of horrors, well that’s what you are_  
 _You made me a life of ashes. . . ._

 _A life of ashes,_ he thought.  _That’s about right, ain’t it?  I got nothin’ left thanks to you, Miss Judy.  You and your horrors and your dreams. . .  the Moonchild. . . the **garmonbozia** and the fire. . . in pure air, intercourse between the two worlds._

Phillip felt sleepy, yet when he closed his eyes he saw the horrid sooty scars his passage had left on the hotel’s wall, the marks of his life of ashes.  Would he leave ashes smeared everywhere he had been, ashes across the memories of his colleagues in Philadelphia?

No, Phillip realized drowsily, no, they would forget.  If it happened it all, they would forget, and it would be like he was never there at all.

He could fade away from the whole world, and it would be like he was never there at all.

\--

Phillip suffered a series of overlapping dreams of BOB haunting the hotel room: BOB lurking at the foot of the bed, peering up at him between the slats of the footboard; BOB’s voice hissing down at him from the slowly turning ceiling fan.  Throughout, Phillip felt sure he was dreaming and struggled to awake, yet each time, he only woke into another dream.  As his fear and panic grew, he knew he was generating more and more _garmonbozia_ for BOB to feed upon.  Still, he could not break out of the dreams until his own screams shook him awake.

However much time had passed since Phillip lay down, the angle of the sunlight coming into the room had not changed.  Gauzy curtains filtered its passage through the glass sliding doors to the balcony, which overlooked the ocean.  Phillip shoved himself upright with both hands and tried to catch his breath, but even with all the brightness of the light, the horror of his dreams would not leave him.

 _It won’t ever leave,_ he thought.  _Her circus of horrors and my life of ashes—that’s what it’s gonna be, horror for the rest of my life._   He felt something wet on his lips, and he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.  It came away with blood smeared across it.

Phillip leaned over to his nightstand and picked up his gun, then sat there cradling it in his lap with both hands.

“Horror for the rest of my life, hunh?” he muttered.  “It ain’t gotta be that long.”  He wrapped his fingers around the grip of the gun and lifted it.  As he did so, Phillip heard a sound, soft and familiar yet eerie and out of place in the hotel room.  It was the scratch of a record player needle as someone disrupted its path along the vinyl’s grooves.

Phillip shivered.  He meant to bring the gun up to his head with the muzzle under his chin, but as he tried to lift it, his motions felt jerky.  Then in his peripheral vision, he saw black mist wafting up from the carpet in a broad patch just beyond the foot of the bed.

“Oh God, hell, no,” Phillip breathed.

Judy flickered into existence in the middle of the misty patch so that the blackness covered her feet and legs up to her shins.  Phillip’s feet scrabbled on the bottom sheet of the bed as he pushed his back up against the headboard.  He could feel her full attention turned on him, and he shuddered so hard, the gun’s muzzle skidded up past the end of his chin.  Judy’s antennae twitched as if following the motion.

“Judy. . . ,” Phillip groaned.  He jerked the gun back into place so that the muzzle rested at the top of his throat, angled to point up to his brain.  While he stared down the bed at Judy, her antennae twitched again, the black cavern of her mouth widened, and she ducked her head and raised her shoulders as if gathering herself to attack.  When she said his name, her voice sounded deep and rough, creaky like an unoiled hinge and scratchy like a phonograph needle. . . yet still a little bit like the socially clueless woman in the red dress who’d charmed him so completely.

“Phillip—”

Phillip’s voice shook as he cut her off, “You ain’t gonna end it for me.”  He clicked off the safety, and her antennae went rigid and pointed directly toward him.  Phillip began to repeat, “You ain’t gonna—” but he never finished.

Judy crouched all the way down to the floor so that her hips and thighs disappeared into the black mist; then she sprung forward.  Phillip screamed when he saw her hurtling through the air towards him, certain she would tear him apart as soon as she could reach him.  The time it took Judy to move through the air lasted forever, and Phillip screamed through all of it with tears in his eyes and fresh blood seeping from the wound in his lip.

Judy landed on top of his thighs, kneeling with a foot and a knee on either side of the lump his legs made under the bedclothes.  Phillip cut off his scream and stared up at Judy in silence as she loomed over him, with her faceless visage inches from his and her backwards hands braced against his shoulders.  Her mouth opened, and he could hear her breathe.  He was startled that she breathed at all.

Then she let go of Phillip’s shoulders to close her hand around his, the hand holding his gun.  With a quick squeeze, Judy sent a stab of pain through Phillip’s hand and wrist.  His fingers went numb and released their hold on the gun, and she snatched it away from him.  Judy cocked her head to the side as she quirked her antennae toward the gun and studied it a moment.  Then she released the magazine and tossed it aside on the floor.

Holding the gun’s grip in one hand and the muzzle in the other, Judy proceeded to bend the weapon almost in half.  It was ridiculously surreal, like something Bugs Bunny would do to Elmer Fudd’s gun in a cartoon.  Once the gun was warped enough to be useless, Judy dropped it on the bedside table.

“If you die, you will be theirs forever,” she growled.  “You’ll go back to the Lodge and they’ll eat your suffering, on and on without end.”  Judy held her mouth open a little, and at that close range, Phillip could see that she had a small chin and thin lips, although they were not quite human-shaped.

He muttered, “Ain’t you come to kill me?  You said you’d devour me—but I kept my part of the deal, Judy, dammit!”  Phillip looked down at her hands.  They now rested on her pale thighs, splayed to either side of his body, with pinkies on the inside and thumbs on the outside.  He thought they were beautiful hands all the same, spread over equally beautiful thighs.

From the neck down, Judy didn’t seem monstrous at all.  Even with her white skin and backwards arms, she was still a woman. . . a woman straddling him in bed with just the bedclothes separating their naked bodies.

Phillip lifted his eyes and glared up into what should have been Judy’s face instead.  Looking there, he could tell himself that she was a monster and not a woman he desired.

He challenged, “I did everything you told me to, ‘cept for bringin’ Gordon the ring—and it ain’t like any of ‘em believed me anyway!  So why’d you come here, Judy?  To make sure I ended up dead, in case I lost my nerve?”

Judy muttered, “No.  I came to stop your fear.  They’re gorging on it—you’re only making BOB stronger.”

“And you can’t have that, right?  ‘Cos the stronger he gets, the easier it’ll be for him to take _her._   The Moonchild.”  Phillip watched Judy as he spoke and noticed how her wide mouth grimaced and her antennae stiffened when he said that word.  _Moonchild._

Judy did not answer, but she used the edge of the bedsheet to wipe the blood from Phillip’s mouth and chin.  She hissed, “I told you not to make yourself bleed.”

Judy dropped the sheet but kept her fingertips there against his chin, where he could feel a slight warmth from her hand.  Her antennae pointed toward Phillip’s face, like she was studying him.  He lifted his own shaking hand and touched the side of Judy’s head, where her temple should be.  In fact, she _did_ have a temple, and a zygomatic arch below that despite her lack of eye sockets and nasal cavities.  She flinched when he touched her, but then she held tense and still.

“You must sleep,” Judy told him without moving.  “Your fear will cease then.”  She put her free hand back on his shoulder and pushed on it until Phillip submitted and lay back against the bed pillows.

“I dreamed about him before.  My fear ain’t gonna go away with dreams like _that_ ,” Phillip muttered.

“You will not dream.”

Phillip knew he should not trust her, but he wanted to.

“What about after, when I wake up?  Will it all be over then, just like a bad dream?  I’ll just turn around and go back home and forget?” Phillip murmured.

“That is what you want?”

Phillip shook his head back and forth on the pillow, slowly.  “No.  I don’t wanna forget _you_ , Miss Judy.”

Judy stayed very still for a long moment, but again, she did not answer him.  Instead, she leaned forward and bent her head over Phillip’s so that her antennae tips could touch his forehead.  Instantly, Phillip’s eyes became too heavy to stay open, but even when he closed them, he didn’t know how he could possibly sleep.  No matter what Judy promised, Phillip was certain BOB would be there in his nightmares.

Phillip heard Judy whispering the words MIKE had chanted in the convenience store: “This is the water, and this is the well.  Drink full and descend.”  She lowered herself enough for Phillip to feel her breath on his face and her bare chest pressing against his just above the sheets that separated the rest of their bodies.  He wanted to touch her, but his arms were as heavy as his eyes, and he could not lift them.

“This is the water,” Judy repeated, “and this is the well.”  He felt her mouth against his parted lips; then Phillip Jeffries descended into sleep without dreaming.

\--

To be continued


	8. Chapter 8

**?  
????**

When Phillip awoke, still sprawled on his back with the bedclothes tangled around him, darkness filled the corners of the hotel room.  Only a dull, purplish light filtered through the curtains. 

He noticed little of this at first, because he opened his eyes to Judy’s head bent over his.  Phillip yelped and pressed his head back into his pillow until he remembered where he was, and with whom.  Judy lay on top of him, and her antennae pointed downward toward him, as if she had been studying him as he slept.

 _Not the first time I’ve woken up in a hotel room, in bed with a strange woman,_ Phillip thought.  _But it’s sure been a while, and “strange woman” meant something a little bit different those other times._   He found that thought funnier than he should have, but at the same time, there was nothing funny at all about the way her body felt against him.

“Judy,” he breathed.  Her antennae quivered.  “What are you doing?”

“You are very strange,” Judy rasped in her low, rough voice.  “Not like other men.  I need to understand.”

After a nervous laugh, Phillip told her, “ _Everyone_ says I’m strange.  But everyone _don’t_ lay on me and watch me sleep.”

His facetiousness was lost on her.  Judy tilted her head and, stretching herself upward, pressed her mouth into his hair just above his brow.

“So very strange,” she muttered into it.

Phillip began, “What’n hell are you—unh, Judy. . . .”  She had slid up a couple more inches and put her hands into his hair.  Whatever she was doing up there, the sensation reminded Phillip of the lice checks his teachers did every year when he was a kid, but he was far more focused on how it had felt when she rubbed against him, and the pressure of her breasts against his chest.  He stared up at her neck—humanoid, slender, even elegant—extended just above his face.

“Oh shit, Judy,” Phillip groaned before closing his eyes and putting his mouth to her throat.  Yet as soon as he caressed it, Judy gave a harsh cry like metal scraping on metal and pushed herself off of him to scramble backwards.  Phillip raised himself up on his elbows and looked at her crouched and shaking near the foot of the bed.

“Sorry, I’m sorry,” he said hoarsely, and her tense body relaxed a little.  He wanted to tell her the reassuring, patronizing things that a man might say to calm a nervous woman he cared for, things like, “I’d never do anything to hurt you,” but that was stupid.  Of course he wouldn’t, because she’d kill him first.  She’d probably do _worse_ than kill him.

Phillip cleared his throat and asked Judy, “What’re you so scared of?  You said you came to stop _my_ fear, but you’re afraid too.”  She growled at him, just plain _growled_.  When he reached out a hand toward her, she shook her head at him hard enough to make her antennae move.

“Aw, Judy, _please,_ what the fuck are you scared of?  What could I ever do to _you_?”  She curled her hand against her thigh and did not answer, and he groaned in frustration.  “When I met you in Buenos Aires, you showed me what I’d been looking for my whole life.  But there was something else too, it was more than that.  You called me strange, but so were you, even when you tried to be human.  You—you were _different_.”

He stopped for a few seconds, then shrugged and said it again because he couldn’t explain it in any other way that she’d understand: “You were different.”  He didn’t understand it himself, only that it had made him want her then, and he still wanted her now despite what she was.

“Different,” Judy repeated.  “Are you different too, Phillip Jeffries?  Are you _really_?  I need to understand.”  When he stared at her in confusion, she crawled closer again until she was even with his thighs.  There, Judy faced Phillip head-on and reached out her hand.

“Come here.  I will show you.  And then I will know.”

Phillip slid down the bed to her, and she grasped his chin in her backwards hand.  She drew his head closer until she could touch her antennae to his forehead.

Judy whispered the same thing she’d said in the apartment in Seattle: “Through the darkness of future past, the magician longs to see.”

Then she showed him the _other_ magician, the one who had trapped her in a nightmare she could not escape.

\--

_Time did not move for Jowday—instead, Jowday moved through time, and so the moment she faced Jack Parsons lasted forever._

_She turned her mind back to it, and she was there again, appearing before him in response to his foolish use of the chant and the ring.  He had called for Babalon, that vapid sacred whore of a goddess he summoned for the sole purpose of bearing him a Moonchild. . . and Jowday had answered._

_Despite his revulsion when he saw the monster who had come in the place of his Babalon, Parsons was determined to mate with her because he believed that together, they could bring forth the Moonchild.  But when Parsons put his hands on Jowday with the intent of raping her, she tore a hole in his face and ripped his flesh from his bones._

_At first when she returned to that moment, it was Parsons there with his curly black hair and mustache, his dark eyes, his pale handsome face fixed in an expression of shock and horror.  Then reality shuddered with a flicker of light and a scratching sound, and Phillip faced Jowday instead with his sandy hair swept up and back from his brow, his bewildered mismatched eyes, that damned lip of his bleeding again._

_Phillip Jeffries was another magician who had stubbornly sought Jowday out, yet he made her feel none of the emotions Parsons had evoked in her: no revulsion, no resentment, no hatred.  What she **did** feel, Jowday could not have named.  Frustrated, maybe, apprehensive. . . fearful that he might become what Parsons had been, because Phillip too wanted to mate with her.  She could feel it when he looked at her and hear it in his voice.  Yet something other than the desire for mastery or a child underlay his lust, and that was what Jowday could not understand, and why she trembled when he touched her._

_Jowday too felt something more, something under the frustration and apprehension, and it was this thing she could not name.  It felt a little like her regret when she remembered the place she had come from, before she became trapped in the physical omniverse by Jack Parsons’s Babalon Working and the Trinity Test of the first atomic bomb.  It felt a little like longing for something she could not have._

_As Jowday relived her memory, Phillip began walking toward her, just as Parsons had done.  One blue eye and one brown eye moved over her quivering antennae and open mouth.  He lifted his right arm and reached out for her.  Jowday began to shake._

_But Phillip did not grab her wrist like Jack Parsons had; he did not try to possess her.  Instead, he held out his open hand to her, palm turned up.  She felt him looking at her, not at her body but at her head, and she could sense something from him that was akin to lust but not quite the same thing.  Jowday could not comprehend it, but he wanted her because of it._

_So yes, Phillip really was different, and Jowday decided she could trust him—trust him and protect him and take possession of him, because he could be useful to her some day.  Only because of that, not because she desired him, not because of what she felt and could not name._

_She moved closer to him._

_“Judy?” Phillip murmured.  “You ain’t gotta keep coming back to this.”_

_She put out her own hand and placed it atop Phillip’s palm, with their fingers matched.  When Phillip threaded his fingers between hers and closed them over her hand, Jowday ceased to tremble._

\--

Phillip felt like he had suddenly come awake from a dream.  He jerked his head back from Judy’s, breaking contact with her antennae, and looked around at the hotel room.  It _had_ been a dream, in a way, but it was her dream. . . the nightmarish memory that haunted her.  As a scholar of the occult, Phillip knew plenty about Jack Parsons, and now he understood just who had caused the mysterious, gruesome injuries that ended Parsons’s life.

“Well, _am_ I different, really?  Are you _positive_?” he mumbled.  Judy put her lips together in something like a frown.

Finally, she pronounced, “You are troublesome—I am positive of _that_ —but yes, also different.”  The corners of her strange, wide mouth curled up, just a little.  The sight of it should have been horrifying, but she was smiling, and alien as it was, Phillip liked to see it.

He reached his free hand out toward her, and when Judy did not draw back, he touched a fingertip to her mouth.  Then he leaned forward and kissed it.

Both of Judy’s hands flew to the back of his neck and clamped down on it.  Phillip kept still and waited with his mouth touching hers.  Finally, she relaxed her hold on his neck and, after a few seconds, dropped her hands to his shoulders to pull him closer.  When he breathed her name into her mouth, Judy made a soft, deep whining sound low in her throat.

After the nightmare she’d shared with him, Phillip hesitated to touch her.  Yet when he dared to put his hands on her waist, she did not tremble or draw back or turn on him.  One of her hands slid down his back, where Judy palmed his spine and gained leverage to pull her body up against his.

Phillip wrapped his arms around Judy and felt her warmth and breath and pulse, felt her being real there in the Palm Deluxe as she had not been above the convenience store.  **_I_** _made her real_ , he thought.

With her mouth still over his, Judy muttered, “I told you I would eat you up, that I couldn’t help myself.  I told you I would devour you.”

“This is devouring me?” Phillip asked with a laugh that faded when Judy replied, “Isn’t it?”

He wondered, but only long enough to decide it really didn’t matter anymore.

\--

Judy told Phillip he had a choice: he could still “turn around, go home, and forget,” or she could take him to another place where he would be what she called “safe.”

“But once you are there, you won’t be able to go back to your world again,” she cautioned.  “Not ever.  It will change you.”

“Change me?  Change me how?  Change me into _what_?” Phillip demanded.

“You will still be _you_ , Phillip,” Judy replied.  She hesitated before adding in a mutter, “I would not change that.”

He murmured, “You wouldn’t, hunh, Miss Judy?  But if I go back to the real world, won’t that change me too?  If I forget everything I’ve discovered. . . if I forget you.”

“You will have to forget.  Otherwise, your friend might use you to find me.  And BOB will still pursue you.”

Phillip asked, “What about if I _do_ forget?  Will he leave me alone?”

“I cannot be sure.”

“And if I go with you?  You said it’s ‘safe,’ but did you mean safe from _him_?” he demanded.

“Yes,” Judy hissed.  “He will not come near you or your _garmonbozia_ —no one will, I won’t allow it.”  Her voice dropped to a lower tone when she added, “You will be mine alone, Phillip.”

He could hear the possessiveness in that voice, and he knew he could be submitting to what amounted to imprisonment.  But the alternative was to return to a state of ignorance where he searched in vain for something beyond his world, and even worse, to leave himself open to BOB and the Arm and all the horror they’d already inflicted upon him.

And of course, to forget _her_ , his blue rose.

“I want to go with you,” Phillip finally told her.

“Then we should go now,” said Judy.  She showed no other reaction.

Phillip dressed quickly, but before he followed Judy to the door, he looked again at the balcony.  The violet light seeping through the curtains intrigued Phillip; _something_ lay out there, and he wanted to see what it was.  He crossed the room and pushed a curtain aside with one hand.

Instead of the blue of the Atlantic—even the deep, navy blue sinking into grey at sunset—the ocean he saw beyond the balcony was violet.  It reflected the hue of a purple sky so heavy with clouds and fog, Phillip couldn’t tell what illuminated it.  Had it a sun?  Moons?  Stars?  The ocean appeared very far below where Phillip stood, at such a severe drop he could see no shoreline.

He let the curtain fall closed and turned back to face Judy.  She stood at the front door to the room, waiting for him.

“Where are we?” Phillip asked her, working to keep his voice steady.  “That—that ain’t Buenos Aires out there.”

“It does not matter.  What matters is where you are going.”  Judy gestured for him to follow her, and he left the hotel room walking close behind her.

They stepped a hallway that had never been part of the Palm Deluxe.  When the hotel room door banged shut, Phillip looked back at it and found it changed to heavy, unremarkable metal.  Everything familiar from his own world had vanished.

Judy led him along the hallway.  Phillip looked up at the domed ceiling then down at Judy’s feet, bare white against a bare white floor.  Along the mottled grey walls, black flooring bordered the white, and when other doorways branched off from the hall, the white floor made pathways leading up to them.  Judy took him some distance; then she turned off the wide hall onto one of the smaller pathways.

The path rounded a corner, and Judy stopped at its edge and turned back toward Phillip.  Before him, he could see only another grey wall, but coming from around the corner, he heard the rhythmic whirr and clank of machinery.

“Phillip, for the last time, are you sure?” Judy questioned him.  He looked at her—her curious antennae, her unwieldy head and hellish mouth, her long backward arms and hands.

He asked, “Are you gonna leave me here, Judy?  You said I’d be safe and I’m gonna trust you, but you never said whether you’d stay with me.”

Judy’s antennae shifted, perhaps looking at him as he was at her.  She said, “I will go away.  But I will come back to you, Phillip.”

He reached for her hands, and when he held them, she did not tremble.

“Then I’m sure,” Phillip told her.  “In fact, Miss Judy. . . I’m positive.”

\--

The End


End file.
